The Development of a Suicidal Ideation Predictive Model for Community-Dwelling Elderly Aged >55 Years

Suicide is an important health and social concern worldwide. Both suicidal ideation and suicide rates are higher in the elderly population than in other age groups; thus, more careful attention and targeted interventions are required. Therefore, we have developed a model to predict suicidal ideation in the community-dwelling elderly aged of >55 years.

A random forest algorithm was applied to those who participated in the Korea Welfare Panel. We used a total of 26 variables as potential predictors. To resolve the imbalance in the dataset resulting from the low frequency of suicidal ideation, training was performed by applying the synthetic minority oversampling technique. The performance index was calculated by applying the predictive model to the test set, which was not included in the training process.

A total of 6410 elderly Korean aged of >55 (mean, 71.48; standard deviation, 9.56) years were included in the analysis, of which 2.7% had suicidal ideation. The results for predicting suicidal ideation using the 26 chosen variables showed an AUC of 0.879, accuracy of 0.871, sensitivity of 0.750, and specificity of 0.874. The most significant variable in the predictive model was the severity of depression, followed by life satisfaction and self-esteem factors. Basic demographic variables such as age and gender demonstrated a relatively small effect.

Machine learning can be used to create algorithms for predicting suicidal ideation in community-dwelling elderly. However, there are limitations to predicting future suicidal ideation. A predictive model that includes both biological and cognitive indicators should be created in the future.