AUTHOR=Bowe Andrea K. , Lightbody Gordon , Staines Anthony , Kiely Mairead E. , McCarthy Fergus P. , Murray Deirdre M. 

TITLE=Predicting Low Cognitive Ability at Age 5—Feature Selection Using Machine Learning Methods and Birth Cohort Data

JOURNAL=International Journal of Public Health

VOLUME=67

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.ssph-journal.org/journals/international-journal-of-public-health/articles/10.3389/ijph.2022.1605047

DOI=10.3389/ijph.2022.1605047

ISSN=1661-8564

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Objectives:</bold> In this study, we applied the random forest (RF) algorithm to birth-cohort data to train a model to predict low cognitive ability at 5 years of age and to identify the important predictive features.</p><p><bold>Methods:</bold> Data was from 1,070 participants in the Irish population-based BASELINE cohort. A RF model was trained to predict an intelligence quotient (IQ) score ≤90 at age 5 years using maternal, infant, and sociodemographic features. Feature importance was examined and internal validation performed using 10-fold cross validation repeated 5 times. Results The five most important predictive features were the total years of maternal schooling, infant Apgar score at 1 min, socioeconomic index, maternal BMI, and alcohol consumption in the first trimester. On internal validation a parsimonious RF model based on 11 features showed excellent predictive ability, correctly classifying 95% of participants. This provides a foundation suitable for external validation in an unseen cohort.</p><p><bold>Conclusion:</bold> Machine learning approaches to large existing datasets can provide accurate feature selection to improve risk prediction. Further validation of this model is required in cohorts representative of the general population.</p>