Machine learning-based prediction of persistent oppositional defiant behavior for 5 years

Early detection of oppositional defiant behavior is warranted for timely intervention in children at risk. This study aimed to build a predictive model of persistent oppositional defiant behavior based on a machine learning algorithm.

With nationwide cohort data collected from 2012 to 2017, a tree-based ensemble model, random forest, was exploited to build a predictive model for persistent oppositional defiant behavior. The persistent oppositional defiant behavior was defined by the presence of oppositional defiant behavior for all the five years. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and Matthew's correlation coefficients (MCC) were measured.

Data of 1,323 children were used for building the machine learning-based predictive model. The baseline mean ± standard deviation month-age of the participants was 51.0 ± 1.2 months. The proportion of persistent oppositional defiant behavior was 0.98% (13/1323). In the hold-out test set, the overall accuracy, AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and MCC were 0.955, 0.982, 1.000, 0.954, and 0.417, respectively.

Our study demonstrated that the machine learning-based approach is useful for predicting persistent oppositional defiant behavior in preschool-aged children.