An Interpretable Intensive Care Unit Mortality Risk Calculator

Mortality risk is a major concern to patients who have just been discharged from the intensive care unit (ICU). Many studies have been directed to construct machine learning models to predict such risk. Although these models are highly accurate, they are less amenable to interpretation and clinicians are typically unable to gain further insights into the patients' health conditions and the underlying factors that influence their mortality risk. In this paper, we use patients' profiles extracted from the MIMIC-III clinical database to construct risk calculators based on different machine learning techniques such as logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, k-nearest neighbors and multilayer perceptrons. We perform an extensive benchmarking study that compares the most salient features as predicted by various methods. We observe a high degree of agreement across the considered machine learning methods; in particular, age, blood urea nitrogen level and the indicator variable - whether the patient is discharged from the cardiac surgery recovery unit are commonly predicted to be the most salient features for determining patients' mortality risks. Our work has the potential to help clinicians interpret risk predictions.