Machine Learning Applied to Omics Datasets Predicts Mortality in Patients with Alcoholic Hepatitis

Alcoholic hepatitis is a major health care burden in the United States due to significant morbidity and mortality. Early identification of patients with alcoholic hepatitis at greatest risk of death is extremely important for proper treatments and interventions to be instituted. In this study, we used gradient boosting, random forest, support vector machine and logistic regression analysis of laboratory parameters, fecal bacterial microbiota, fecal mycobiota, fecal virome, serum metabolome and serum lipidome to predict mortality in patients with alcoholic hepatitis. Gradient boosting achieved the highest AUC of 0.87 for both 30-day mortality prediction using the bacteria and metabolic pathways dataset and 90-day mortality prediction using the fungi dataset, which showed better performance than the currently used model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score.