Performance Maintenance of Machine Learning-based Emergency Patient Mortality Predictive Models

Machine learning provides a flexible technique to predict the survival of patients who are admitted to hospital as emergency admissions. Mortality prediction is a central component of emergency patient quality of care and this can act as an indicator of severity to determine who needs prioritized care. Machine learning-based models, as opposed to human-crafted severity score systems, allow for much more complex and updateable models to be developed based on a larger set of input data attributes. While various studies of machine learning-based predictive models for predicting inpatient mortality have been carried out there is little literature on performance maintenance of these models. Determining the performance maintenance of these models over time determines how reliably they can be utilized into the future and for how long. The best performing model in this study achieve's an AUC of 0.86 upon training and is able to maintain a similarly high AUC of 0.845 as of the end of the period of performance maintenance evaluation nine months later. This is the first paper that the authors are aware of to consider and measure relative performance maintenance of machine learning-based models for emergency admission mortality prediction.