Abstract
BACKGROUND: This study aimed to develop and test an explainable machine learning (ML) predictive model based on lipid-related biomarkers to predict acute coronary syndrome (ACS) in hospitalized patients. METHODS: A total of 10,127 consecutive hospitalized patients at three large hospitals were retrospectively studied between 2022 and 2024. ACS incidence was recorded as the primary outcome. Eight ML models were used to calculate the risk of ACS during hospitalization and to distribute patients into low-, intermediate-, and high-risk groups. RESULTS: All patients were randomly divided into a 70% training set (n = 7088) and a 30% test set (n = 3039). ACS occurred in 1119 (15.8%) and 461 (15.2%) patients, respectively. The Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) exhibited the best predictive performance (area under the curve, 0.829) for ACS in the training set. The final model, which included the top 10 features from the LightGBM model, including lipid-related markers and clinical features, achieved a C-index of 0.781 on the test set and demonstrated a significant ability to stratify patients into low-, intermediate-, and high-risk groups. CONCLUSION: We constructed a risk-stratification model based on lipid-related biomarkers derived from ML models to predict ACS in hospitalized patients, which could assist in identifying patients with high discriminatory capacity.