Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Jul 30, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 3, 2018 - Sep 6, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 9, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Development of Prediction Models Using Machine Learning Algorithms for Girls with Suspected Central Precocious Puberty: Retrospective Study
Background:
Central precocious puberty (CPP) in girls seriously affects their physical and mental development in childhood. The method of diagnosis—gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH)–stimulation test or GnRH analogue (GnRHa)–stimulation test—is expensive and makes patients uncomfortable due to the need for repeated blood sampling.
Objective:
We aimed to combine multiple CPP–related features and construct machine learning models to predict response to the GnRHa-stimulation test.
Methods:
In this retrospective study, we analyzed clinical and laboratory data of 1757 girls who underwent a GnRHa test in order to develop XGBoost and random forest classifiers for prediction of response to the GnRHa test. The local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) algorithm was used with the black-box classifiers to increase their interpretability. We measured sensitivity, specificity, and area under receiver operating characteristic (AUC) of the models.
Results:
Both the XGBoost and random forest models achieved good performance in distinguishing between positive and negative responses, with the AUC ranging from 0.88 to 0.90, sensitivity ranging from 77.91% to 77.94%, and specificity ranging from 84.32% to 87.66%. Basal serum luteinizing hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, and insulin-like growth factor-I levels were found to be the three most important factors. In the interpretable models of LIME, the abovementioned variables made high contributions to the prediction probability.
Conclusions:
The prediction models we developed can help diagnose CPP and may be used as a prescreening tool before the GnRHa-stimulation test.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.