u/fishie-raf

I’m building an ICU mortality prediction model with 4,391 patients and want to use SOFA and SAPS II components as predictors.

Some patients are not eligible for these scores, so their values are blank because the score does not apply to them, not because the data are simply missing.

My problem:

• If I remove these patients, I may remove important high-risk groups. For example, I have 308 IHD/ACS patients with 26.9% mortality, compared with 13.3% mortality overall. Removing them could change my patient population and mortality distribution.
• If I use MICE to impute their values, I would be creating values for scores that were never applicable to these patients.

For patients who are eligible but have missing values, I can use MICE. I’m unsure what to do specifically with the ineligible patients.

What would be the best way to handle this while keeping my full ICU population?

I’m building an ICU mortality prediction model with 4,391 patients and want to use SOFA and SAPS II components as predictors.

Some patients are not eligible for these scores, so their values are blank because the score does not apply to them, not because the data are simply missing.

My problem:

• If I remove these patients, I may remove important high-risk groups. For example, I have 308 IHD/ACS patients with 26.9% mortality, compared with 13.3% mortality overall. Removing them could change my patient population and mortality distribution.
• If I use MICE to impute their values, I would be creating values for scores that were never applicable to these patients.

For patients who are eligible but have missing values, I can use MICE. I’m unsure what to do specifically with the ineligible patients.

What would be the best way to handle this while keeping my full ICU population?