Intervention Prediction for Patients with Pressure Injury Using Random Forest

Pressure injury (PI) is one of the major causes of short-term death. Early intervention for patients at risk plays an essential role in PI. However, many nurses may ignore risks. This paper aims to establish a model to predict interventions according to the patient's physical signs, which can help nurses develop care plans. We used data from 1,483 patients with 25 characteristics and 17 interventions. We use the Random Forest and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to optimize model parameters. Then we compared it with KNN, SVM, and Decision Tree. The 10-fold cross-validation result showed that the Random Forest has better accuracy than other methods, with an f1 score of 0.84. This finding proved the feasibility of using machine learning to help formulate care plans according to the classification of index prediction results. Our model shows that hemoglobin, Braden PI score, and age are the three most influential risk factors.