Development and Validation of Various Phenotyping Algorithms for Diabetes Mellitus Using Data from Electronic Health Records

摘要

Precision medicine requires extremely large samples. Electronic health records (EHR) are thought to be a cost-effective source of data for that purpose. Phenotyping algorithms help reduce classification errors, making EHR a more reliable source of information for research. Four algorithm development strategies for classifying patients according to their diabetes status (diabetics; non-diabetics; inconclusive) were tested (one codes-only algorithm; one boolean algorithm, four statistical learning algorithms and six stacked generalization meta-Iearners). The best performing algorithms within each strategy were tested on the validation set. The stacked generalization algorithm yielded the highest Kappa coefficient value in the validation set (0.95 95% CI 0.91, 0.98). The implementation of these algorithms allows for the exploitation of data from thousands of patients accurately, greatly reducing the costs of contructing retrospective cohorts for research.