Employing advanced supervised machine learning approaches for predicting micronutrient intake status among children aged 6–23 months in Ethiopia

The Lancet, 382(9890), 427-451

Background As more and more researchers are turning to big data for new opportunities of biomedical discoveries, machine learning models, as the backbone of big data analysis, are mentioned more often in biomedical journals. However, owing to the inherent complexity of machine learning methods, they are prone to misuse. Because of the flexibility in specifying machine learning models, the results are often insufficiently reported in research articles, hindering reliable assessment of model validity and consistent interpretation of model outputs. Objective To attain a set of guidelines on the use of machine learning predictive models within clinical settings to make sure the models are correctly applied and sufficiently reported so that true discoveries can be distinguished from random coincidence. Methods A multidisciplinary panel of machine learning experts, clinicians, and traditional statisticians were interviewed, using an iterative process in accordance with the Delphi method. Results The process produced a set of guidelines that consists of (1) a list of reporting items to be included in a research article and (2) a set of practical sequential steps for developing predictive models. Conclusions A set of guidelines was generated to enable correct application of machine learning models and consistent reporting of model specifications and results in biomedical research. We believe that such guidelines will accelerate the adoption of big data analysis, particularly with machine learning methods, in the biomedical research community.

Model validation is the most important part of building a supervised model. For building a model with good generalization performance one must have a sensible data splitting strategy, and this is crucial for model validation. In this study, we conducted a comparative study on various reported data splitting methods. The MixSim model was employed to generate nine simulated datasets with different probabilities of mis-classification and variable sample sizes. Then partial least squares for discriminant analysis and support vector machines for classification were applied to these datasets. Data splitting methods tested included variants of cross-validation, bootstrapping, bootstrapped Latin partition, Kennard-Stone algorithm (K-S) and sample set partitioning based on joint X–Y distances algorithm (SPXY). These methods were employed to split the data into training and validation sets. The estimated generalization performances from the validation sets were then compared with the ones obtained from the blind test sets which were generated from the same distribution but were unseen by the training/validation procedure used in model construction. The results showed that the size of the data is the deciding factor for the qualities of the generalization performance estimated from the validation set. We found that there was a significant gap between the performance estimated from the validation set and the one from the test set for the all the data splitting methods employed on small datasets. Such disparity decreased when more samples were available for training/validation, and this is because the models were then moving towards approximations of the central limit theory for the simulated datasets used. We also found that having too many or too few samples in the training set had a negative effect on the estimated model performance, suggesting that it is necessary to have a good balance between the sizes of training set and validation set to have a reliable estimation of model performance. We also found that systematic sampling method such as K-S and SPXY generally had very poor estimation of the model performance, most likely due to the fact that they are designed to take the most representative samples first and thus left a rather poorly representative sample set for model performance estimation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s41664-018-0068-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.