Mortality prediction in ICU Using a Stacked Ensemble Model

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has huge scope in developing models to predict the survival rate of critically ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU). The availability of electronic clinical data has led to the widespread use of various machine learning approaches in this field. Innovative algorithms play a crucial role in boosting the performance of models. This study uses a stacked ensemble model to predict mortality in ICU by incorporating the clinical severity scoring results, in which several machine learning algorithms are employed to compare the performance. The experimental results show that the stacked ensemble model achieves good performance compared with the model without integrating the severity scoring results, which has the area under curve (AUC) of 0.879 and 0.862, respectively. To improve the performance of prediction, two feature subsets are obtained based on different feature selection techniques, labeled as SetS and SetT. Evaluation performances show that the SEM based on the SetS achieves a higher AUC value (0.879 and 0.860). Finally, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis is employed to interpret the correlation between the risk features and the outcome.