Predicting 30-day Readmission in Heart Failure using Machine Learning Techniques

摘要

Heart Failure (HF) is a syndrome that reduces patients' quality of life, and has severe impacts on healthcare systems worldwide, such as the high rate of readmissions. In order to reduce the readmissions and improve patients' quality of life, several studies are trying to assess the risk of a patient to be readmitted, so that taking right actions clinicians can prevent patient deterioration and readmission. Predictive models have the ability to identify patients at high risk. Henceforth, this paper studies predictive models to determine the risk of a HF patient to be readmitted in the next 30 days after discharge. We present two different approaches. In the first one, we combine unsupervised and supervised classification and achieved AUC score of 0.64. In the second one, we combine decision tree and Naive Bayes classifiers and achieved AUC score of 0.61. Additionally, we discover that the results improve when training the predictive models with different readmission's threshold outcome, reaching the AUC score of 0.73 when applying the first approach.