A Novel Hybrid Ordinal Learning Model With Health Care Application

Ordinal learning (OL) is a type of machine learning models with broad utility in health care applications such as diagnosis of different grades of a disease (e.g., mild, modest, severe) and prediction of the speed of disease progression (e.g., very fast, fast, moderate, slow). This paper aims to tackle a situation when precisely labeled samples are limited in the training set due to cost or availability constraints, whereas there could be an abundance of samples with imprecise labels. We focus on imprecise labels that are intervals, i.e., one can know that the a sample belongs to an interval of labels but cannot know which unique label it has. This situation is quite common in health care datasets due to limitations of the diagnostic instrument, sparse clinical visits, or/and patient dropout. Limited research has been done to develop OL models with imprecise/interval labels. We propose a new Hybrid Ordinal Learner (HOL) to integrate samples with both precise and interval labels to train a robust OL model. We also develop a tractable and efficient optimization algorithm to solve the HOL formulation. We compare HOL with several recently developed OL methods on four benchmarking datasets, which demonstrate the superior performance of HOL. Finally, we apply HOL to a real-world dataset for predicting the speed of progressing to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) for individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) based on a combination of multi-modality neuroimaging and demographic/clinical datasets. HOL achieves high accuracy in the prediction and outperforms existing methods. The capability of accurately predicting the speed of progression to AD for each individual with MCI has the potential for helping facilitate more individually-optimized interventional strategies.Note to Practitioners—Machine learning (ML) algorithms have been widely adopted to support disease diagnosis and prognosis. In some situations, the outcome variable of interest is on an ordinal scale, i.e., it includes several classes with a natural order. For example, the variable of interest can be the grade of a disease as mild, moderate, or severe; or it can be the progression speed of a disease as very fast, fast, moderate, or slow. Ordinal learning (OL) is the type of ML algorithms for ordinal variable prediction. Most existing OL algorithms can only include samples with precise labels in training. However, it is common to have samples with imprecise/interval labels, i.e., we know that a sample belongs to a range of classes/labels but do not know which specific class/label it belongs to. This situation can happen due to a variety of different reasons such as use of less accurate diagnostic instrument under cost or availability constraints, sparse clinical assessment, and patient dropout. We propose a Hybrid Ordinal Learner (HOL) to integrate samples with both precise and interval labels to train a robust OL model. HOL is evaluated using four public benchmarking datasets and shows superior performance compared to existing methods. Also, we apply HOL to a real-world dataset for predicting the speed of progressing to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) for individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). MCI is the prodromal stage of AD. Individuals with MCI show noticeable signs of memory loss and cognitive declines, but these symptoms are not severe enough to interfere their independent living. HOL achieves high accuracy in predicting the speed of progressing to AD for each MCI subject (e.g., the speed of ‘very fast’‘, fast’‘, moderate’, or ‘slow), which could potentially help facilitate the development of more individually-optimized interventional strategies.

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