Predicting mortality of patients with acute kidney injury in the ICU using XGBoost model

The goal of this study is to construct a mortality prediction model using the XGBoot (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) decision tree model for AKI (acute kidney injury) patients in the ICU (intensive care unit), and to compare its performance with that of three other machine learning models.

We used the eICU Collaborative Research Database (eICU-CRD) for model development and performance comparison. The prediction performance of the XGBoot model was compared with the other three machine learning models. These models included LR (logistic regression), SVM (support vector machines), and RF (random forest). In the model comparison, the AUROC (area under receiver operating curve), accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score were used to evaluate the predictive performance of each model.

A total of 7548 AKI patients were analyzed in this study. The overall in-hospital mortality of AKI patients was 16.35%. The best performing algorithm in this study was XGBoost with the highest AUROC (0.796, p < 0.01), F1(0.922, p < 0.01) and accuracy (0.860). The precision (0.860) and recall (0.994) of the XGBoost model rank second among the four models.

XGBoot model had obvious advantages of performance compared to the other machine learning models. This will be helpful for risk identification and early intervention for AKI patients at risk of death.