Suicide Death Prediction Using the Maryland Suicide Data Warehouse: A Sensitivity Analysis

Nearly 50,000 Americans die each year from suicide, despite suicide death being a rare event in the context of health risk assessment and modeling. Prior research has underscored the need for contextualizing suicide risk models in terms of their potential uses and generalizability. This sensitivity analysis makes use of the Maryland Suicide Data Warehouse (MSDW) and illustrates how results inform clinical decision support.

A cohort of 1 million living control patients were extracted from the MSDW in addition to 1,667 patients who had died by suicide between the years 2016 and 2019 according to the Maryland Office of the Medical Examiner (OCME). Data were extracted and aggregated as part of a 4-year retrospective design. Binary logistic and two penalized regression models were deployed in a repeated fivefold cross-validation. Model performances were evaluated using sensitivity, positive predictive value (PPV), and F1, and model coefficients were ranked according to coefficient size.

Several features were significantly associated with patients having died by suicide, including male sex, depressive and anxiety disorder diagnoses, social needs, and prior suicidal ideation and suicide attempt. Cross-validated binary logistic regression outperformed either ridge or LASSO (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) models but generally achieved low-to-moderate PPV and sensitivity across most thresholds and a peak F1 of 0.323.

Suicide death prediction is constrained by the context of use, which determines the best balance of precision and recall. Predictive models must be evaluated close to the level of intervention. They may not hold up to different needs at different levels of care.