A machine learning case study to predict rare clinical event of interest: imbalanced data, interpretability, and...

Accurate prediction of a rare and clinically important event following study treatment has been crucial in drug development. For instance, the rarity of an adverse event is often commensurate with the seriousness of medical consequences, and delayed detection of the rare adverse event can pose significant or even life-threatening health risks to patients. In this machine learning case study, we demonstrate with an example originated from a real clinical trial setting how to define and solve the rare clinical event prediction problem using machine learning in pharmaceutical industry. The unique contributions of this work include the proposal of a six-step investigation framework that facilitates the communication with non-technical stakeholders and the interpretation of the model performance in terms of practical consequences in the context of patient screenings for conducting a future clinical trial. In terms of machine learning methodology, for data splitting into the training and test sets, we adapt the rare-event stratified split approach (from scikit-learn) to further account for group splitting for multiple records of a patient simultaneously. To handle imbalanced data due to rare events in model training, the cost-sensitive learning approach is employed to give more weights to the minor class and the metrics precision together with recall are used to capture prediction performance instead of the raw accuracy rate. Finally, we demonstrate how to apply the state-of-the-art SHAP values to identify important risk factors to improve model interpretability.