Machine Learning Based Prediction Model for Using Non-steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs on Risk of Adverse Events

To investigate the usefulness of machine learning approaches on linked administrative health data at the population level in predicting older patients’ one-year risk of adverse events after supplied with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Patients from a Western Australian cardiovascular population who were supplied with NSAIDs between 1 Jan 2003 and 31 Dec 2004 were identified from Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme data. Comorbidities from linked hospital admissions data and medication history were inputs. Admissions for acute coronary syndrome or deaths within one year from the last supply date were outputs. Machine learning classification methods were used to build models to predict ACS and optimise their performance, measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, sensitivity and specificity. There were 69007 patients in the NSAIDs cohort with mean age 76 years and 54.3% were female. 1882 patients were admitted for acute coronary syndrome and 5405 patients dead within one year after their last supply of NSAIDs. The multi-layer neural network, gradient boosting machine and support vector machine were applied to build various classification models. The models achieved an average AUC-ROC score of 0.72 predicting ACS and 0.84 predicting death. Machine learning models applied to linked administrative data can potentially improve adverse event risk prediction. Further investigation of additional data and approaches are required further to improve the performance for adverse event risk prediction.