Predicting Age of Onset in TTR-FAP Patients with Genealogical Features

This work describes a problem oriented approach to analyze and predict the Age of Onset of Patients diagnosed with Transthyretin Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (TTR-FAP). We constructed, from a set of clinical and familial records, three sets of features which represent different characteristics of a patient, before becoming symptomatic. Using those features, we tested a set of machine learning regression methods, namely Decision Tree (Regression Tree), Elastic Net, Lasso, Linear Regression, Random Forest Regressor, Ridge Regression and Support Vector Machine Regressor (SVM). Later, we defined a baseline model that represents the current medical practice to serve as a guideline for us to measure the accuracy of our approach. Our results show a significant improvement of machine learning methods when compared with the current baseline.