MAgEC: Using Non-Homogeneous Ensemble Consensus for Predicting Drivers in Unexpected Mechanical Ventilation

We conduct exploratory analysis of a novel algorithm called Model Agnostic Effect Coefficients (MAgEC) for extracting clinical features of importance when assessing an individual patient's healthcare risks, alongside predicting the risk itself. Our approach uses a non-homogeneous consensus-based algorithm to assign importance to features, which differs from similar approaches, which are homogeneous (typically purely based on random forests). Using the MIMIC-III dataset, we apply our method on predicting drivers/causers of unexpected mechanical ventilation in a large cohort patient population. We validate the MAgEC method using two primary metrics: its accuracy in predicting mechanical ventilation and the similarity of the proposed feature importances to a competing algorithm (SHAP). We also more closely discuss MAgEC itself by examining the stability of our proposed feature importances under different perturbations and whether the non-homogeneity of the approach actually leads to feature importance diversity. The code to implement MAgEC is open-sourced on GitHub (https://github.com/gstef80/MAgEC).