Feature Representation for ICU Mortality

Good predictors of ICU Mortality have the potential to identify high-risk patients earlier, improve ICU resource allocation, or create more accurate population-level risk models. Machine learning practitioners typically make choices about how to represent features in a particular model, but these choices are seldom evaluated quantitatively. This study compares the performance of different representations of clinical event data from MIMIC II in a logistic regression model to predict 36-hour ICU mortality. The most common representations are linear (normalized counts) and binary (yes/no). These, along with a new representation termed "hill", are compared using both L1 and L2 regularization. Results indicate that the introduced "hill" representation outperforms both the binary and linear representations; the hill representation thus has the potential to improve existing models of ICU mortality.