On the application of multi-class classification in physical therapy recommendation

Abstract

Recommending optimal rehabilitation intervention for injured workers that would lead to successful return-to-work (RTW) is a challenge for clinicians. Currently, the clinicians are unable to identify with complete confidence which intervention is best for a patient and the referral is often made in trial and error fashion. Only 58% recommendations are successful in our dataset. We aim to develop an interpretable decision support system using machine learning to assist the clinicians. We proposed an alternate ripper (ARIPPER) combined with a hybrid re-sampling technique, and a balanced weighted random forests (BWRF) ensemble method respectively, in order to tackle the multi-class imbalance, class overlap and noise problem in real world application data. The final models have shown promising potential in classification compared to human baseline and has been integrated into a web-based decision-support tool that requires additional validation in a clinical sample.