FRELSA: A dataset for frailty in elderly people originated from ELSA and evaluated through machine learning models

Frailty is an age-related syndrome characterized by loss of strength and exhaustion and associated with multi-morbidity. Early detection and prediction of the appearance of frailty could help older people age better and prevent them from needing invasive and expensive treatments. Machine learning techniques show promising results in creating a medical support tool for such a task.

This study aims to create a dataset for machine learning-based frailty studies, using Fried's Frailty Phenotype definition. Starting from a longitudinal study on aging in the UK population, we defined a frailty label for each subject. We evaluated the definition by training seven different models for detecting frailty with data that were contemporary to the ones used for the definition. We then integrated more data from two years before to obtain prediction models with a 24-month horizon. Features selection was performed using the MultiSURF algorithm, which ranks all features in order of relevance to the detection or prediction task.

We present a new frailty dataset of 5303 subjects and more than 6500 available features. It is publicly available, provided one has access to the original English Longitudinal Study of Ageing dataset. The dataset is balanced after grouping frailty with pre-frailty, and it is suitable for multiclass or binary classification and prediction problems. The seven tested architectures performed similarly, forming a solid baseline that can be improved with future work. Linear regression achieved the best F-score and AUROC in detection and prediction tasks.

Creating new frailty-annotated datasets of this size is necessary to develop and improve the frailty prediction techniques. We have shown that our dataset can be used to study and test machine learning models to detect and predict frailty. Future work should improve models' architecture and performance, consider explainability, and possibly enrich the dataset with older waves.