Sarcopenia Prediction for Elderly People Using Machine Learning: A Case Study on Physical Activity

Sarcopenia is a well-known age-related disease that can lead to musculoskeletal disorders and chronic metabolic syndromes, such as sarcopenic obesity. Numerous studies have researched the relationship between sarcopenia and various risk factors, leading to the development of predictive models based on these factors. In this study, we explored the impact of physical activity (PA) in daily life and obesity on sarcopenia prediction. PA is easier to measure using personal devices, such as smartphones and watches, or lifelogs, than using other factors that require medical equipment and examination. To demonstrate the feasibility of sarcopenia prediction using PA, we trained various machine learning models, including gradient boosting machine (GBM), xgboost (XGB), lightgbm (LGB), catboost (CAT), logistic regression, support vector classifier, k-nearest neighbors, random forest (RF), multi-layer perceptron, and deep neural network (DNN), using data samples from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Among the models, the DNN achieved the most precise accuracy on average, 81%, with PA features across all data combinations, and the accuracy increased up to 90% with the addition of obesity information, such as total fat mass and fat percentage. Considering the difficulty of measuring the obesity feature, when adding waist circumference to the PA features, the DNN recorded the highest accuracy of 84%. This model accuracy could be improved by using separate training sets according to gender. As a result of measurement with various metrics for accurate evaluation of models, GBM, XGB, LGB, CAT, RF, and DNN demonstrated significant predictive performance using only PA features including waist circumference, with AUC values at least around 0.85 and often approaching or exceeding 0.9. We also found the key features for a highly performing model such as the quantified PA value and metabolic equivalent score in addition to a simple obesity measure such as body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference using SHAP analysis.