Supervised Learning Provides Small but Consistent Improvements to Clustering when Predicting Chronic Pain Outcomes
Ilias Thomas1, Roger Nyberg1, Riccardo Lomartire2
1School of Information and Engineering, Dalarna University, Borlänge, Sweden.
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
|May 23, 2026
Abstract:
Using registry and questionnaire data from 47,235 chronic pain patients, we evaluated whether supervised learning outperforms clustering in predicting nine one-year outcomes. Supervised models showed small but consistent improvements (best RMSE 5.49 vs. 5.92; R2 0.34 vs. 0.19), with overall comparable performance.
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