Comparing machine learning and regression models for mortality prediction based on the Hungarian Myocardial Infarction Registry

The objective of the current study is to compare the relative performance of decision tree, neural network, and logistic regression for predicting 30-day and 1-year mortality in a real-word, unfiltered dataset (n=47,391) of patients hospitalized with acute myocardial infarction. Area under the ROC curve (AUC) was used for evaluating performance of a learning algorithm. For 30-day mortality, we achieved an average of 0.788 for decision tree models, 0.837 for neural net models and 0.836 for regression models on training set (on validation sets: 0.774, 0.835 and 0.834, respectively). For 1-year mortality, the averages were 0.754 for decision tree models, 0.8194 for neural net models and 0.8191 for regression models (on validation sets: 0.743, 0.8179 and 0.8176, respectively). Differences were non-significant between neural network and regression, but both significantly outperformed decision trees. The machine learning methods investigated in the present study could not outperform traditional regression modelling for mortality prediction in myocardial infarction.