Investigating the differential impact of psychosocial factors by patient characteristics and demographics on Veteran suicide risk through machine learning extraction of cross-modal interactions

Accurate prediction of suicide risk is crucial for identifying patients with elevated risk burden, helping ensure these patients receive targeted care. The US Department of Veteran Affairs' suicide prediction model primarily leverages structured electronic health records (EHR) data. This approach largely overlooks unstructured EHR, a data format that could be utilized to enhance predictive accuracy. This study aims to enhance suicide risk models' predictive accuracy by developing a model that incorporates both structured EHR predictors and semantic NLP-derived variables from unstructured EHR. XGBoost models were fit to predict suicide risk- the interactions identified by the model were extracted using SHAP, validated using logistic regression models, added to a ridge regression model, which was subsequently compared to a ridge regression approach without the use of interactions. By introducing a selection parameter, α, to balance the influence of structured (α=1) and unstructured (α=0) data, we found that intermediate α values achieved optimal performance across various risk strata, improved model performance of the ridge regression approach and uncovered significant cross-modal interactions between psychosocial constructs and patient characteristics. These interactions highlight how psychosocial risk factors are influenced by individual patient contexts, potentially informing improved risk prediction methods and personalized interventions. Our findings underscore the importance of incorporating nuanced narrative data into predictive models and set the stage for future research that will expand the use of advanced machine learning techniques, including deep learning, to further refine suicide risk prediction methods.