Predictive Modelling Strategies to Understand Heterogeneous Manifestations of Asthma in Early Life

Wheezing is common among children and ∼50% of those under 6 years of age are thought to experience at least one episode of wheeze. However, due to the heterogeneity of symptoms there are difficulties in treating and diagnosing these children. 'Phenotype specific therapy' is one possible avenue of treatment, whereby we use significant pathology and physiology to identify and treat pre-schoolers with wheeze. By performing feature selection algorithms and predictive modelling techniques, this study will attempt to determine if it is possible to robustly distinguish patient diagnostic categories among pre-school children. Univariate feature analysis identified more objective variables and recursive feature elimination a larger number of subjective variables as important in distinguishing between patient categories. Predicative modelling saw a drop in performance when subjective variables were removed from analysis, indicating that these variables are important in distinguishing wheeze classes. We achieved 90%+ performance in AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, and 80%+ in kappa statistic, in distinguishing ill from healthy patients. Developed in a synergistic statistical-machine learning approach, our methodologies propose also a novel ROC Cross Evaluation method for model post-processing and evaluation. Our predictive modelling's stability was assessed in computationally intensive Monte Carlo simulations.