Machine learning for risk prediction of acute coronary syndrome.

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) accounts for 1.36 million hospitalizations and billions of dollars in costs in the United States alone. A major challenge to diagnosing and treating patients with suspected ACS is the significant symptom overlap between patients with and without ACS. There is a high cost to over- and under-treatment. Guidelines recommend early risk stratification of patients, but many tools lack sufficient accuracy for use in clinical practice. Prognostic indices often misrepresent clinical populations and rely on curated data. We used random forest and elastic net on 20,078 deidentified records with significant missing and noisy values to develop models that outperform existing ACS risk prediction tools. We found that the random forest (AUC = 0.848) significantly outperformed elastic net (AUC=0.818), ridge regression (AUC = 0.810), and the TIMI (AUC = 0.745) and GRACE (AUC = 0.623) scores. Our findings show that random forest applied to noisy and sparse data can perform on par with previously developed scoring metrics.