International Journal of Epidemiology 2002;31:1253-1262
© International Epidemiological Association 2002
Theory and Methods |
Prediction of risk of coronary events in middle-aged men in the Prospective Cardiovascular Münster Study (PROCAM) using neural networks
a Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine,
b Institute of Arteriosclerosis Research, University of Münster, Germany.
Correspondence: Dr Paul Cullen, Institut für Arterioskleroseforschung an der Universität Münster, Domagkstraße 3, 48149 Münster, Germany. E-mail: cullen{at}uni-muenster.de
Background Logistic regression (LR) is commonly used to estimate risk of coronary heart disease. We investigated if neural networks improved on the risk estimate of LR by analysing data from the Prospective Cardiovascular Münster Study (PROCAM), a large prospective epidemiological study of risk factors for coronary heart disease among men and women at work in northern Germany.
Methods We used a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and probabilistic neural networks (PNN) to estimate the risk of myocardial infarction or acute coronary death (coronary events) during 10 years follow-up among 5159 men aged 3565 years at recruitment into PROCAM. In all, 325 coronary events occurred in this group. We assessed the performance of each procedure by measuring the area under the receiver-operating characteristics curve (AUROC).
Results The AUROC of the MLP was greater than that of the PNN (0.897 versus 0.872), and both exceeded the AUROC for LR of 0.840. If high risk is defined as an event risk >20% in 10 years, LR classified 8.4% of men as high risk, 36.7% of whom suffered an event in 10 years (45.8% of all events). The MLP classified 7.9% as high risk, 64.0% of whom suffered an event (74.5% of all events), while with the PNN, only 3.9% were at high risk, 58.6% of whom suffered an event (33.5% of all events).
Conclusion Intervention trials indicate that about one in three coronary events can be prevented by 5 years of lipid-lowering treatment. Our analysis suggests that use of the MLP to identify high-risk individuals as candidates for drug treatment would allow prevention of 25% of coronary events in middle-aged men, compared to 15% and 11% with LR and the PNN, respectively.
Keywords Coronary heart disease, risk factors, neural networks, logistic regression
Accepted 31 July 2002
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