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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Pediatr.
Sec. Pediatric Infectious Diseases
Volume 13 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/fped.2025.1490500
This article is part of the Research Topic Diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of infectious diseases in children View all 6 articles
Advancing Risk Factor Identification for Pediatric Lobar Pneumonia: The Promise of Machine Learning Technologies
Provisionally accepted- 1 Suzhou Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University, Suzhou, Liaoning Province, China
- 2 School of Life Science and Biopharmaceuticals, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China
Background: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a prevalent pediatric condition, and lobar pneumonia (LP) is considered a severe subtype. Early identification of LP is crucial for appropriate management. This study aimed to develop and compare machine learning models to predict LP in children with CAP.Methods: A total of 25 clinical and laboratory variables were collected. Missing data (< 2%) were imputed, and the dataset was split into training (60%) and validation (40%) sets. Univariable logistic regression and Boruta feature selection were used to identify significant predictors. Four machine learning algorithms-Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Decision Tree (DT)-were compared using area under the curve (AUC), balanced accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score. SHAP analysis was performed to interpret the best-performing model.: A total of 278 patients with CAP were included in this study, of whom 65 were diagnosed with LP. The XGBoost model demonstrated the best performance with an AUC of 0.880 (95% CI: 0.807-0.934) in the training set and 0.746 (95% CI: 0.664-0.843) in the validation set. SHAP analysis identified age, CRP, CD64 index, lymphocyte percentage, and ALB as the top five predictive factors. Conclusion: The XGBoost model showed superior performance in predicting LP in children with CAP. The model enabled early diagnosis and risk assessment of LP, thereby facilitating appropriate clinical decision-making.
Keywords: Lobar pneumonia, machine learning, risk factor, pediatric, XGBoost
Received: 03 Sep 2024; Accepted: 07 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shen, Wu, Lu, Jiang, Zhang, Xu and Ran. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Min Lu, Suzhou Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University, Suzhou, Liaoning Province, China
Yiguo Jiang, Suzhou Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University, Suzhou, Liaoning Province, China
Xiaolan Zhang, Suzhou Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University, Suzhou, Liaoning Province, China
Qiuyan Xu, Suzhou Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University, Suzhou, Liaoning Province, China
Shuangqin Ran, Suzhou Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University, Suzhou, Liaoning Province, China
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