Prediction of diabetic kidney disease risk using machine learning models: a population-based cohort study of Asian adults
- Singapore Eye Research Institute, Singapore
- National University of Singapore, Singapore
- Singapore General Hospital, Singapore
Abstract
Background: Machine learning (ML) techniques improve disease prediction by identifying the most relevant features in multi-dimensional data. We compared the accuracy of ML algorithms for predicting incident diabetic kidney disease (DKD).
Methods: We utilized longitudinal data from 1365 Chinese, Malay and Indian participants aged 40-80 years with diabetes but free of DKD who participated in the baseline and 6-year follow-up visit of the Singapore Epidemiology of Eye Diseases Study (2004-2017). Incident DKD (11.9%) was defined as an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) <60 mL/min/1.73m2 with at least 25% decrease in eGFR at follow-up from baseline. 339 features including participant characteristics, retinal imaging, genetic and blood metabolites were used as predictors. Performances of several ML models were compared to each other and to logic regression (LR) model based on established features of DKD (age, sex, ethnicity, duration of diabetes, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and body mass index) using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC).
Results: ML model, Elastic Net (EN) had the best AUC (95% confidence interval) of 0.851 (0.847-0.856), which was 7.0% relatively higher than by LR 0.795 (0.790-0.801). Sensitivity and specificity of EN were 88.2% and 65.9% vs. 73.0% and 72.8% by LR. The top-15 predictors included age, ethnicity, antidiabetic medication, hypertension, diabetic retinopathy, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, eGFR and metabolites related to lipids, lipoproteins, fatty acids and ketone bodies.
Conclusions: Our results showed ML together with feature selection improves prediction accuracy of DKD risk in an asymptomatic stable population and identifies novel risk factors including metabolites.
Funding: This study was supported by the National Medical Research Council, NMRC/OFLCG/001/2017 and NMRC/HCSAINV/MOH-001019-00. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Data availability
The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials. The individual participant-level data cannot be shared publicly due to privacy and confidentiality concerns. However, de-identified data may be available upon request with a project proposal to qualified individuals, subject to approval by the Singapore Eye Research Institute and access will require a data sharing agreement. Interested researchers can send data access requests to Prof. Ching-Yu Cheng at the Singapore Eye Research Institute using the following email address: cheng.ching.yu@seri.com.sgProcessed version of the datasets are provided in Supplementary Tables S1-S5.
Article and author information
Author details
Charumathi Sabanayagam
Funding
National Medical Research Council (NMRC/OFLCG/001/2017)
- Gavin Tan
National Medical Research Council (NMRC/HCSAINV/MOH-001019-00)
- Charumathi Sabanayagam
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: SEED was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the SingHealth Centralised Institutional Review Board [2018/2717, 2018/ 2921, 2012/487/A, 2015/2279, 2018/2006, 2018/2594, 2018/2570]. Informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Copyright
© 2023, Sabanayagam et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Prediction of diabetic kidney disease risk using machine learning models: a population-based cohort study of Asian adults
eLife 12:e81878.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81878
