Machine Learning Models to Predict Future Frailty in Community-Dwelling Middle-Aged and Older Adults: The ELSA Cohort Study

Abstract

Background: Machine learning (ML) models can be used to predict future frailty in the community setting. However, outcome variables for epidemiologic data sets such as frailty usually have an imbalance between categories, that is, there are far fewer individuals classified as frail than as nonfrail, adversely affecting the performance of ML models when predicting the syndrome. Methods: A retrospective cohort study with participants (50 years or older) from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing who were nonfrail at baseline (2008–2009) and reassessed for the frailty phenotype at 4-year follow-up (2012–2013). Social, clinical, and psychosocial baseline predictors were selected to predict frailty at follow-up in ML models (Logistic Regression, Random Forest [RF], Support Vector Machine, Neural Network, K-nearest neighbor, and Naive Bayes classifier). Results: Of all the 4 378 nonfrail participants at baseline, 347 became frail at follow-up. The proposed combined oversampling and undersampling method to adjust imbalanced data improved the performance of the models, and RF had the best performance, with areas under the receiver-operating characteristic curve and the precision-recall curve of 0.92 and 0.97, respectively, specificity of 0.83, sensitivity of 0.88, and balanced accuracy of 85.5% for balanced data. Age, chair-rise test, household wealth, balance problems, and self-rated health were the most important frailty predictors in most of the models trained with balanced data. Conclusions: ML proved useful in identifying individuals who became frail over time, and this result was made possible by balancing the data set. This study highlighted factors that may be useful in the early detection of frailty.