Comparative Analysis of Predictive Methods for Early Assessment of Compliance with Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Therapy

Patients suffering from obstructive sleep apnea are mainly treated with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). Good compliance with this therapy is broadly accepted as more than 4h of CPAP average use nightly. Although it is a highly effective treatment, compliance with this therapy is problematic to achieve with serious consequences for the patients' health. Previous works already reported factors significantly related to compliance with the therapy. However, further research is still required to support clinicians to early anticipate patients' therapy compliance. This work intends to take a further step in this direction by building compliance classifiers with CPAP therapy at three different moments of the patient follow-up (i.e. before the therapy starts and at months 1 and 3 after the baseline). Results of the clinical trial confirmed that month 3 was the time-point with the most accurate classifier reaching an f1-score of 87% and 84% in cross-validation and test. At month 1, performances were almost as high as in month 3 with 82% and 84% of f1-score. At baseline, where no information about patients' CPAP use was given yet, the best classifier achieved 73% and 76% of f1-score in cross-validation and test set respectively. Subsequent analyses carried out with the best classifiers of each time point revealed that certain baseline factors (i.e. headaches, psychological symptoms, arterial hypertension and EuroQol visual analogue scale) were closely related to the prediction of compliance independently of the time-point. In addition, among the variables taken only during the follow-up of the patients, Epworth and the average nighttime hours were the most important to predict compliance with CPAP.