Predicting intensive care unit readmissions using probabilistic fuzzy systems

We propose the application of probabilistic fuzzy systems (PFS) to model the prediction of early readmission in intensive care unit patients and compare it with the gold-standard method - logistic regression based on the APACHE II score. PFS are characterized by the combination of the linguistic description of the system with the statistical properties of data. On one hand, results point that PFS models perform comparably to the gold-standard method, with AUC values of 0.66±0.03. On the other hand, results also show that PFS models use a significant lower number of variables which, from the clinical practice point of view, suggests improved gains in terms of simplicity.