Logistic regression was as good as machine learning for predicting major chronic diseases

Objective To evaluate the performance of machine learning (ML) algorithms and to compare them with logistic regression for the prediction of risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), chronic kidney disease (CKD), diabetes (DM), and hypertension (HTN) and in a prospective cohort study using simple clinical predictors. Study Design and Setting We conducted analyses in a population-based cohort study in Asian adults (n = 6,762). Five different ML models were considered—single-hidden-layer neural network, support vector machine, random forest, gradient boosting machine, and k-nearest neighbor—and were compared with standard logistic regression. Results The incidences at 6 years of CVD, CKD, DM, and HTN cases were 4.0%, 7.0%, 9.2%, and 34.6%, respectively. Logistic regression reached the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for CKD (0.905 [0.88, 0.93]) and DM (0.768 [0.73, 0.81]) predictions. For CVD and HTN, the best models were neural network (0.753 [0.70, 0.81]) and support vector machine (0.780 [0.747, 0.812]), respectively. However, the differences with logistic regression were small (less than 1%) and nonsignificant. Logistic regression, gradient boosting machine, and neural network were systematically ranked among the best models. Conclusion Logistic regression yields as good performance as ML models to predict the risk of major chronic diseases with low incidence and simple clinical predictors.