Interpretable Stratification for Chronic Kidney Disease Progression Based on Time to Event Analysis

In Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), kidneys are damaged and lose their ability to filter blood, leading to a plethora of health consequences that end up in dialysis. Despite its prevalence, CKD goes often undetected at early stages. In order to better understand disease progression, we stratified patients with CKD by considering the time to dialysis from diagnosis of early CKD (stages 1 or 2). To achieve this, we first reduced the number of clinical features in a predictive time-to-dialysis model and identified the top important features on a cohort of ∼ 40, 000 CKD patients. The extracted features were used to stratify a subpopulation of 3, 522 patients that showed anemia and were prescribed for cardiovascular-related drugs and progressed faster to dialysis. On the other side, clustering patients using conventional clustering methods based on their clinical features did not allow such clear interpretation to identify the main factors for leading fast progression to dialysis. To our knowledge this is the first study extracting interpretable features for stratifying a cohort of early CKD patients using time-to-event analysis which could help prevention and the development of new treatments.