Predicting mortality risk of COVID-19 among chronic kidney disease patients using machine learning algorithms

Objective: COVID-19 disease has a high prevalence and mortality rate among chronic kidney disease patients. Previous studies have shown that ML-based prediction models are effective for developing preventive strategies. Despite several efforts to establish prediction models for COVID-19 mortality risk among different populations, few studies have focused on COVID-19 mortality among patients with chronic kidney disease. The current study aimed to develop an effective, efficient preventive strategy to improve prognosis and survival among these patients by constructing a machine-learning-based prediction model. Methods: The current retrospective study used single-center data from 556 hospitalized patients with CKD. All patients in the cohort had respiratory failure following COVID-19. We leveraged ensemble and non-ensemble algorithms to construct a prediction model and scored the chosen features for better interpretability. Results: The empirical results of this study showed that XG-Boost achieved an AU-ROC of 0.921 with a 95% CI of [0.906-0.941] and an AU-ROC of 0.851 with a 95% CI of [0.835-0.877] in training and validation modes, respectively, yielding more favourable predictive performance than the models. Conclusion: XG-Boost demonstrated predictive merit that can be leveraged as an auxiliary tool to aid clinicians in making more informed decisions in clinical settings.