Prediction and the influencing factor study of colorectal cancer hospitalization costs in China based on machine learning-random forest and support vector regression: a retrospective study

Aims As people's standard of living improves, the incidence of colorectal cancer is increasing, and colorectal cancer hospitalization costs are relatively high. Therefore, predicting the cost of hospitalization for colorectal cancer patients can provide guidance for controlling healthcare costs and for the development of related policies.Methods This study used the first page of medical record data on colorectal cancer inpatient cases of a tertiary first-class hospital in Shenzhen from 2018 to 2022. The impacting factors of hospitalization costs for colorectal cancer were analyzed. Random forest and support vector regression models were used to establish predictive models of the cost of hospitalization for colorectal cancer patients and to compare and evaluate.Results In colorectal cancer inpatients, major procedures, length of stay, level of procedure, Charlson comorbidity index, age, and medical payment method were the important influencing factors. In terms of the test set, the R2 of the Random forest model was 0.833, the R2 of the Support vector regression model was 0.824; the root mean square error (RMSE) of the Random forest model was 0.029, and the RMSE of the Support vector regression model was 0.032. In the Random Forest model, the weight of the major procedure was the highest (0.286).Conclusion Major procedures and length of stay have the greatest impacts on hospital costs for colorectal cancer patients. The random forest model is a better method to predict the hospitalization costs for colorectal cancer patients than the support vector regression.