Development of a deep learning model to predict smoking status in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: A secondary analysis of cross-sectional national survey.

Objective: This study aims to develop and validate a deep learning model to predict smoking status in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) using data from a national survey.

Methods: Data from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2007-2018) were used to extract 5466 COPD-eligible cases. The data collection involved demographic, behavioral, and clinical variables, including 21 predictors such as age, sex, and pulmonary function test results. The dependent variable, smoking status, was categorized as smoker or nonsmoker. A residual neural network (ResNN) model was developed and compared with five machine learning algorithms (random forest, decision tree, Gaussian Naive Bayes, K-nearest neighbor, and AdaBoost) and two deep learning models (multilayer perceptron and TabNet). Internal validation was performed using five-fold cross-validation, and model performance was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score.

Results: The ResNN achieved an AUROC, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score of 0.73, 70.1%, 75.2%, and 0.67, respectively, outperforming previous machine learning and deep learning models in predicting smoking status in patients with COPD. Explainable artificial intelligence (Shapley additive explanations) identified key predictors, including sex, age, and perceived health status.

Conclusion: This deep learning model accurately predicts smoking status in patients with COPD, offering potential as a decision-support tool to detect high-risk persistent smokers for targeted interventions. Future studies should focus on external validation and incorporate additional behavioral and psychological variables to improve its generalizability and performance.