Predictive Modeling of Surgical Site Infections Using Sparse Laboratory Data

As part of a data mining competition, a training and test set of laboratory test data about patients with and without surgical site infection (SSI) were provided. The task was to develop predictive models with training set and identify patients with SSI in the no label test set. Lab test results are vital resources that guide healthcare providers make decisions about all aspects of surgical patient management. Many machine learning models were developed after pre-processing and imputing the lab tests data and only the top performing methods are discussed. Overall, RANDOM FOREST algorithms performed better than Support Vector Machine and Logistic Regression. Using a set of 74 lab tests, with RF, there were only 4 false positives in the training set and predicted 35 out of 50 SSI patients in the test set (Accuracy 0.86, Sensitivity 0.68, and Specificity 0.91). Optimal ways to address healthcare data quality concerns and imputation methods as well as newer generalizable algorithms need to be explored further to decipher new associations and knowledge among laboratory biomarkers and SSI.