Yang Yan, Zhong Chen, Cai Xu et al.
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) directly collected from cancer patients being treated with radiation therapy play a vital role in assisting clinicians in counseling patients regarding likely toxicities. Precise prediction and evaluation of symptoms or health status associated with PROs are fundamental to enhancing decision-making and planning for the required services and support as patients transition into survivorship. However, the raw PRO data collected from hospitals exhibits some intrinsic challenges such as incomplete item reports and imbalance patient toxicities. To the end, in this study, we explore various machine learning techniques to predict patient outcomes related to health status such as pain levels and sleep discomfort using PRO datasets from a cancer photon/proton therapy center. Specifically, we deploy six advanced machine learning classifiers -- Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, Gradient Boosting (GB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Multi-Layer Perceptron with Bagging (MLP-Bagging), and Logistic Regression (LR) -- to tackle a multi-class imbalance classification problem across three prevalent cancer types: head and neck, prostate, and breast cancers. To address the class imbalance issue, we employ an oversampling strategy, adjusting the training set sample sizes through interpolations of in-class neighboring samples, thereby augmenting minority classes without deviating from the original skewed class distribution. Our experimental findings across multiple PRO datasets indicate that the RF and XGB methods achieve robust generalization performance, evidenced by weighted AUC and detailed confusion matrices, in categorizing outcomes as mild, intermediate, and severe post-radiation therapy. These results underscore the models' effectiveness and potential utility in clinical settings.