Interpretable Machine Learning for Inpatient COVID-19 Mortality Risk Assessments: Diabetes Mellitus Exclusive Interplay.

People with diabetes mellitus (DM) are at elevated risk of in-hospital mortality from coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). This vulnerability has spurred efforts to pinpoint distinctive characteristics of COVID-19 patients with DM. In this context, the present article develops ML models equipped with interpretation modules for inpatient mortality risk assessments of COVID-19 patients with DM. To this end, a cohort of 156 hospitalised COVID-19 patients with pre-existing DM is studied. For creating risk assessment platforms, this work explores a pool of historical, on-admission, and during-admission data that are DM-related or, according to preliminary investigations, are exclusively attributed to the COVID-19 susceptibility of DM patients. First, a set of careful pre-modelling steps are executed on the clinical data, including cleaning, pre-processing, subdivision, and feature elimination. Subsequently, standard machine learning (ML) modelling analysis is performed on the cured data. Initially, a classifier is tasked with forecasting COVID-19 fatality from selected features. The model undergoes thorough evaluation analysis. The results achieved substantiate the efficacy of the undertaken data curation and modelling steps. Afterwards, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) technique is assigned to interpret the generated mortality risk prediction model by rating the predictors' global and local influence on the model's outputs. These interpretations advance the comprehensibility of the analysis by explaining the formation of outcomes and, in this way, foster the adoption of the proposed methodologies. Next, a clustering algorithm demarcates patients into four separate groups based on their SHAP values, providing a practical risk stratification method. Finally, a re-evaluation analysis is performed to verify the robustness of the proposed framework.

COVID-19 mortality risk assessments for individuals with and without diabetes mellitus: Machine learning models integrated with interpretation framework.

This research develops machine learning models equipped with interpretation modules for mortality risk prediction and stratification in cohorts of hospitalised coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) patients with and without diabetes mellitus (DM). To this end, routinely collected clinical data from 156 COVID-19 patients with DM and 349 COVID-19 patients without DM were scrutinised. First, a random forest classifier forecasted in-hospital COVID-19 fatality utilising admission data for each cohort. For the DM cohort, the model predicted mortality risk with the accuracy of 82%, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 80%, sensitivity of 80%, and specificity of 56%. For the non-DM cohort, the achieved accuracy, AUC, sensitivity, and specificity were 80%, 84%, 91%, and 56%, respectively. The models were then interpreted using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), which explained predictors' global and local influences on model outputs. Finally, the k-means algorithm was applied to cluster patients on their SHAP values. The algorithm demarcated patients into three clusters. Average mortality rates within the generated clusters were 8%, 20%, and 76% for the DM cohort, 2.7%, 28%, and 41.9% for the non-DM cohort, providing a functional method of risk stratification.