Sleep apnea test prediction based on Electronic Health Records

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The identification of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is done by a Polysomnography test which is often done in later ages. Being able to notify potential insured members at earlier ages is desirable. For that, we develop predictive models that rely on Electronic Health Records (EHR) and predict whether a person will go through a sleep apnea test after the age of 50. A major challenge is the variability in EHR records in various insured members over the years, which this study investigates as well in the context of controls matching, and prediction. Since there are many temporal variables, the RankLi method was introduced for temporal variable selection. This approach employs the t-test to calculate a divergence score for each temporal variable between the target classes. We also investigate here the need to consider the number of EHR records, as part of control matching, and whether modeling separately for subgroups according to the number of EHR records is more effective. For each prediction task, we trained 4 different classifiers including 1-CNN, LSTM, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression, on data until the age of 40 or 50, and on several numbers of temporal variables. Using the number of EHR records for control matching was found crucial, and using learning models for subsets of the population according to the number of EHR records they have was found more effective. The deep learning models, particularly the 1-CNN, achieved the highest balanced accuracy and AUC scores in both male and female groups. In the male group, the highest results were also observed at age 50 with 100 temporal variables, resulting in a balanced accuracy of 90% and an AUC of 93%.