Disease-Specific Risk Prediction through Stability Selection using Electronic Health Records

Disease-specific risk prediction aims at assessing the risk of a patient in developing a target disease based on his/her health profile. As electronic health records (EHRs) become more prevalent, a large number of features can be constructed in order to characterize patient profiles. This wealth of data provides unprecedented opportunities for data mining researchers to address important biomedical questions. Practical data mining challenges include: How to correctly select and rank those features based on their prediction power? What predictive model performs the best in predicting a target disease using those features? In this paper, we propose top-k stability selection, which generalizes a powerful sparse learning method for feature selection by overcoming its limitation on parameter selection. In particular, our proposed top-k stability selection includes the original stability selection method as a special case given k = 1. Moreover, we show that the top-k stability selection is more robust by utilizing more information from selection probabilities than the original stability selection, and provides stronger theoretical properties. In a large set of real clinical prediction datasets, the top-k stability selection methods outperform many existing feature selection methods including the original stability selection. We also compare three competitive classification methods (SVM, logistic regression and random forest) to demonstrate the effectiveness of selected features by our proposed method in the context of clinical prediction applications. Finally, through several clinical applications on predicting heart failure related symptoms, we show that top-k stability selection can successfully identify important features that are clinically meaningful.