Predicting kidney transplant survival using tree-based modeling.

Predicting the outcome of kidney transplantation is clinically important and computationally challenging. The goal of this project was to develop the models predicting probability of kidney allograft survival at 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10 years. Kidney transplant data from the United States Renal Data System (January 1, 1990, to December 31, 1999, with the follow-up through December 31, 2000) were used (n = 92,844). Independent variables included recipient demographic and anthropometric data, end-stage renal disease course, comorbidity information, donor data, and transplant procedure variables. Tree-based models predicting the probability of the allograft survival were generated using roughly two-thirds of the data (training set), with the remaining one-third left aside to be used for models validation (testing set). The prediction of the probability of graft survival in the independent testing dataset achieved a good correlation with the observed survival (r = 0.94, r = 0.98, r = 0.99, r = 0.93, and r = 0.98) and relatively high areas under the receiving operator characteristic curve (0.63, 0.64, 0.71, 0.82, and 0.90) for 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year survival prediction, respectively. The models predicting the probability of 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year allograft survival have been validated on the independent dataset and demonstrated performance that may suggest implementation in clinical decision support system.