A New Hybrid Predictive Model to Predict the Early Mortality Risk in Intensive Care Units on a Highly Imbalanced Dataset

Abstract

Due to the development of biomedical equipment and healthcare level, especially in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), a considerable amount of data has been collected for analysis. Mortality prediction in the ICUs is considered as one of the most important topics in the healthcare data analysis section. A precise prediction of the mortality risk for patients in ICU could provide us with valuable information about patients’ lives and reduce costs at the earliest possible stage. This paper aims to introduce a new hybrid predictive model using the Genetic Algorithm as a feature selection method and a new ensemble classifier based on the combination of Stacking and Boosting ensemble methods to create an early mortality prediction model on a highly imbalanced dataset. The SVM-SMOTE method is used to solve the imbalanced data problem. This paper compares the new model with various machine learning models to validate the efficiency of the introduced model. The achieved results using the shuffle 5-fold cross-validation and random hold-out methods indicate that the new hybrid model has the best performance among other classifiers. Additionally, the Friedman test is applied as a statistical significance test to examine the differences between classifiers. The results of the statistical analysis prove that the proposed model is more effective than other classifiers. Furthermore, the proposed model is compared to APACHE and SAPS scoring systems and is benchmarked against state-of-the-art predictive models applied to the MIMIC dataset for experimental validation and achieved promising results as it outperformed the state-of-the-art models.