Abstract
BACKGROUND: Clinical testing, including food-specific skin and serum IgE level tests, provides limited accuracy to predict food allergy. Confirmatory oral food challenges (OFCs) are often required, but the associated risks, cost, and logistic difficulties comprise a barrier to proper diagnosis. OBJECTIVE: We sought to utilize advanced machine learning methodologies to integrate clinical variables associated with peanut allergy to create a predictive model for OFCs to improve predictive performance over that of purely statistical methods. METHODS: Machine learning was applied to the Learning Early about Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study of 463 peanut OFCs and associated clinical variables. Patient-wise cross-validation was used to create ensemble models that were evaluated on holdout test sets. These models were further evaluated by using 2 additional peanut allergy OFC cohorts: the IMPACT study cohort and a local University of Michigan cohort. RESULTS: In the LEAP data set, the ensemble models achieved a maximum mean area under the curve of 0.997, with a sensitivity and specificity of 0.994 and 1.00, respectively. In the combined validation data sets, the top ensemble model achieved a maximum area under the curve of 0.871, with a sensitivity and specificity of 0.763 and 0.980, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Machine learning models for predicting peanut OFC results have the potential to accurately predict OFC outcomes, potentially minimizing the need for OFCs while increasing confidence in food allergy diagnoses.