Physician-Friendly Machine Learning: A Case Study with Cardiovascular Disease Risk Prediction

Machine learning is often perceived as a sophisticated technology accessible only by highly trained experts. This prevents many physicians and biologists from using this tool in their research. The goal of this paper is to eliminate this out-dated perception. We argue that the recent development of auto machine learning techniques enables biomedical researchers to quickly build competitive machine learning classifiers without requiring in-depth knowledge about the underlying algorithms. We study the case of predicting the risk of cardiovascular diseases. To support our claim, we compare auto machine learning techniques against a graduate student using several important metrics, including the total amounts of time required for building machine learning models and the final classification accuracies on unseen test datasets. In particular, the graduate student manually builds multiple machine learning classifiers and tunes their parameters for one month using scikit-learn library, which is a popular machine learning library to obtain ones that perform best on two given, publicly available datasets. We run an auto machine learning library called auto-sklearn on the same datasets. Our experiments find that automatic machine learning takes 1 h to produce classifiers that perform better than the ones built by the graduate student in one month. More importantly, building this classifier only requires a few lines of standard code. Our findings are expected to change the way physicians see machine learning and encourage wide adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in clinical domains.