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The aim of study was to develop an ensemble machine learning method for constructing interpretable predictive models and to validate it using the example of predicting in-hospital mortality (IHM) in patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI).

A retrospective cohort study was conducted using data from 5446 electronic medical records of STEMI patients who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Patients were divided into two groups: 335 (6.2%) patients who died during hospitalization and 5111 (93.8%) patients with a favourable in-hospital outcome. A pool of potential predictors was formed using statistical methods. Through multimetric categorization (minimizing p-values, maximizing the area under the ROC curve (AUC), and SHAP value analysis), decision trees, and multivariable logistic regression (MLR), predictors were transformed into risk factors for IHM. Predictive models for IHM were developed using MLR, Random Forest Risk Factors (RandFRF), Stochastic Gradient Boosting (XGboost), Random Forest (RF), Adaptive boosting, Gradient Boosting, Light Gradient-Boosting Machine, Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), Explainable Boosting Machine and Stacking methods.

Authors developed the RandFRF method, which integrates the predictive outcomes of modified decision trees, identifies risk factors and ranks them based on their contribution to the risk of adverse outcomes. RandFRF enables the development of predictive models with high discriminative performance (AUC 0.908), comparable to models based on CatBoost and Stacking (AUC 0.904 and 0.908, respectively). In turn, risk factors provide clinicians with information on the patient’s risk group classification and the extent of their impact on the probability of IHM. The risk factors identified by RandFRF can serve not only as rationale for the prediction results but also as a basis for developing more accurate models.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.