Extreme Gradient Boosting Model Has a Better Performance in Predicting the Risk of 90-Day Readmissions in Patients with Ischaemic Stroke

Object Ischemic stroke readmission within 90 days of hospital discharge is an important quality of care metric. The readmission rates of ischemic stroke patients are usually higher than those of patients with other chronic diseases. Our aim was to identify the ischemic stroke readmission risk factors and establish a 90-day readmission prediction model for first-time ischemic stroke patients. Methods The readmission prediction model was developed using the extreme gradient boosting (XGboost) model, which can generate an ensemble of classification trees and assign a predictive risk score to each feature. The patient data were split into a training set (5159) and a validation set (911). The prediction results were evaluated with the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and time-dependent ROC curve, which were compared with the outputs from the logistic regression (LR) model. Results A total of 6070 adult patients (39.6% female, median age 67 years) without any ischemic attack (IS) history were included, and 520 (8.6%) were readmitted within 90 days. The XGboost-based prediction model achieved a standard area under the curve (AUC) value of .782 (.729-.834), and the best time-dependent AUC value was .808 in 54 days for the validation set. In contrast, the LR model yielded a standard AUC value of .771 (.714-.828) and best time-dependent AUC value of .797. Conclusions The XGboost model obtained a better risk prediction for 90-day readmission for first-time ischemic stroke patients than the LR model. This model can also reveal the high risk factors for stroke readmission in first-time ischemic stroke patients.