Comparison of methods for early-readmission prediction in a high-dimensional heterogeneous covariates and time-to-event outcome framework
Published in BMC Medical Research Methodology, 2019
Simon Bussy, Raphaël Veil, Vincent Looten, Anita Burgun, Stéphane Gaïffas, Agathe Guilloux, Brigitte Ranque and Anne-Sophie Jannot
Choosing the most performing method in terms of outcome prediction or variables selection is a recurring problem in prognosis studies, leading to many publications on methods comparison. But some aspects have received little attention. First, most comparison studies treat prediction performance and variable selection aspects separately. Second, methods are either compared within a binary outcome setting (where we want to predict whether the readmission will occur within an arbitrarily chosen delay or not) or within a survival analysis setting (where the outcomes are directly the censored times), but not both. In this paper, we propose a comparison methodology to weight up those different settings both in terms of prediction and variables selection, while incorporating advanced machine learning strategies.