A machine learning-based data mining in medical examination data: a biological features-based biological age prediction model

Abstract

Background Biological age (BA) has been recognized as a more accurate indicator of aging than chronological age (CA). However, the current limitations include: insufficient attention to the incompleteness of medical data for constructing BA; Lack of machine learning-based BA (ML-BA) on the Chinese population; Neglect of the influence of model overfitting degree on the stability of the association results. Methods and results Based on the medical examination data of the Chinese population (45–90 years), we first evaluated the most suitable missing interpolation method, then constructed 14 ML-BAs based on biomarkers, and finally explored the associations between ML-BAs and health statuses (healthy risk indicators and disease). We found that round-robin linear regression interpolation performed best, while AutoEncoder showed the highest interpolation stability. We further illustrated the potential overfitting problem in ML-BAs, which affected the stability of ML-Bas’ associations with health statuses. We then proposed a composite ML-BA based on the Stacking method with a simple meta-model (STK-BA), which overcame the overfitting problem, and associated more strongly with CA (r = 0.66, P < 0.001), healthy risk indicators, disease counts, and six types of disease. Conclusion We provided an improved aging measurement method for middle-aged and elderly groups in China, which can more stably capture aging characteristics other than CA, supporting the emerging application potential of machine learning in aging research.

Biomarkers selection and mathematical modeling in biological age estimation

“…Also, there is a risk of overfitting with many biomarkers in the same model 79 . Recently Yang et al 80 suggested a composite ML-BA based on the stacking technique with a simple meta-model to avoid overfitting and improved the performance of the BA estimates in predicting different health outcomes 80 . A brief description of the stacking method is provided in the Supplementary information file.…”