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A genetic programming approach to development of clinical prediction models: a case study in symptomatic cardiovascular disease

Bannister, Christian A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8558-9480, Halcox, Julian P., Currie, Craig J., Preece, Alun ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0349-9057 and Spasic, Irena ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8132-3885 2018. A genetic programming approach to development of clinical prediction models: a case study in symptomatic cardiovascular disease. PLoS ONE 13 (9) , e0202685. 10.1371/journal.pone.0202685

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Abstract

Background: Genetic programming (GP) is an evolutionary computing methodology capable of identifying complex, non-linear patterns in large data sets. Despite the potential advantages of GP over more typical, frequentist statistical approach methods, its applications to survival analyses are rare, at best. The aim of this study was to determine the utility of GP for the automatic development of clinical prediction models. Methods: We compared GP against the commonly used Cox regression technique in terms of the development and performance of a cardiovascular risk score using data from the SMART study, a prospective cohort study of patients with symptomatic cardiovascular disease. The composite endpoint was cardiovascular death, non-fatal stroke, and myocardial infarction. A total of 3,873 patients aged 19–82 years were enrolled in the study 1996–2006. The cohort was split 70:30 into derivation and validation sets. The derivation set was used for development of both GP and Cox regression models. These models were then used to predict the discrete hazards at t = 1, 3, and 5 years. The predictive ability of both models was evaluated in terms of their risk discrimination and calibration using the validation set. Results: The discrimination of both models was comparable. At time points t = 1, 3, and 5 years the C-index was 0.59, 0.69, 0.64 and 0.66, 0.70, 0.70 for the GP and Cox regression models respectively. At the same time points, the calibration of both models, which was assessed using calibration plots and the generalization of the Hosmer-Lemeshow test statistic, was also comparable, but with the Cox model being better calibrated to the validation data. Conclusion: Using empirical data, we demonstrated that a prediction model developed automatically by GP has predictive ability comparable to that of manually tuned Cox regression. The GP model was more complex, but it was developed in a fully automated way and comprised fewer covariates. Furthermore, it did not require the expertise normally needed for its derivation, thereby alleviating the knowledge elicitation bottleneck. Overall, GP demonstrated considerable potential as a method for the automated development of clinical prediction models for diagnostic and prognostic purposes

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Computer Science & Informatics
Medicine
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Additional Information: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher: Public Library of Science
ISSN: 1932-6203
Funders: MRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 6 September 2018
Date of Acceptance: 6 August 2018
Last Modified: 24 Jul 2023 21:38
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/114657

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