Predicting 30-day readmissions in pneumonia patients using machine learning and residential greenness

Identifying factors that increase the risk of hospital readmission will help determine high-risk patients and decrease the socioeconomic burden. Pneumonia is associated with high readmission rates. Although residential greenness has been reported to have beneficial health effects, no studies have investigated its importance in predicting readmission in patients with pneumonia. This study aimed to build prediction models for 30-day readmission in patients with pneumonia and to analyze the importance of risk factors for readmission, mainly residential greenness.

Data on 47 risk factors were collected from 22,600 patients diagnosed with pneumonia. Residential greenness was quantified as the mean of normalized difference vegetation index of the district in which the patient resides. Prediction models were built using logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, and extreme gradient boosting.

Residential greenness was selected from the top 21 risk factors after feature selection. The area under the curves of the four models were 0.6919, 0.6931, 0.7117, and 0.7044. Age, red blood cell distribution width, and history of cancer were the top three risk factors affecting readmission prediction. Residential greenness was the 15th important factor.

We constructed prediction models for 30-day readmission of patients with pneumonia by incorporating residential greenness as a risk factor. The models demonstrated sufficient performance, and residential greenness was significant in predicting readmission. Incorporating residential greenness into the identification of groups at high risk for readmission can complement the possible loss of information when using data from electronic health records.