Enhanced machine learning predictive modeling for delirium in elderly ICU patients with COPD and respiratory failure: A retrospective study based on MIMIC-IV

Background and objective Elderly patients with Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and respiratory failure admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) have a poor prognosis, and the occurrence of delirium further worsens outcomes and increases hospitalization costs. This study aimed to develop a predictive model for delirium in this patient population and identify associated risk factors Methods Data for the machine learning model were obtained from the MIMIC-IV database. Feature variable screening was conducted using Lasso regression and the best subset method. Four models—K-nearest neighbor, random forest, logistic regression, and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost)—were trained and optimized to predict delirium risk. The stability of the model is evaluated using ten-fold cross validation and the effectiveness of the model on the validation set is evaluated using accuracy, F1 score, precision and recall. The SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method was used to explain the importance of each variable in the model. Results A total of 1,155 patients admitted to the intensive care unit between 2008 and 2019 were included in the study, with a delirium incidence of 12.9% (149/1,155). Among the four ML models evaluated, the XGBoost model demonstrated the best discriminative ability. In the validation set, it achieved an AUC of 0.932, indicating superior performance with high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.891, 0.839, 0.795, and 0.810, respectively. Key features identified through SHAP analysis included the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) verbal score, length of hospital stay, mean SpO₂ on the first day of ICU admission, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) equation score, mean diastolic blood pressure, GCS motor score, gender, and duration of noninvasive ventilation. These findings provide valuable insights for individualized risk management. Conclusions The developed prediction model effectively predicts the occurrence of delirium in elderly COPD patients with respiratory failure in the ICU. This model can assist clinical decision-making, potentially improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs.