Identifying subjective life expectancy risk factors in physically active and inactive middle-aged and older adults...

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Gerontology
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Physical activity significantly impacts public health and is linked to well-being and subjective life expectancy.
• Understanding risk factors for subjective life expectancy is crucial for developing targeted health interventions.
• This study focuses on differentiating these factors based on physical activity levels in middle-aged and older adults.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify risk factors for subjective life expectancy in middle-aged and older adults.
• To compare these factors between individuals with active and inactive physical activity levels.
• To provide an evidence base for differentiated health intervention strategies.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from 10,945 participants in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) 2018.
• Developed and compared five machine learning models (RF, LR, SVM, XGBoost, LightGBM) for active and inactive groups.
• Employed Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), 70/30 train/test split, and ten-fold cross-validation with grid search for model optimization and evaluation (AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score).

Main Results:

• Support Vector Machine (SVM) performed best in the inactive group (AUC: 0.797), identifying 'age' as the key factor.
• Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) performed best in the active group (AUC: 0.775), identifying 'perceived health' as the key factor.
• Significant differences in model performance and key risk factors were observed between active and inactive groups.

Conclusions:

• Machine learning models effectively identify critical risk factors for subjective life expectancy in older adults.
• Findings highlight the importance of 'age' for inactive individuals and 'perceived health' for active individuals.
• Results support the development of tailored health management strategies based on physical activity levels.