Citation

Lee J, Kim HR. J. Korean Med. Sci. 2018; 33(19): e144.

Affiliation

Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, Seoul, Korea.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Korean Academy of Medical Science)

DOI

10.3346/jkms.2018.33.e144

PMID

29736160

PMCID

PMC5934520

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Many studies have tried to develop predictors for return-to-work (RTW). However, since complex factors have been demonstrated to predict RTW, it is difficult to use them practically. This study investigated whether factors used in previous studies could predict whether an individual had returned to his/her original work by four years after termination of the worker's recovery period.

METHODS: An initial logistic regression analysis of 1,567 participants of the fourth Panel Study of Worker's Compensation Insurance yielded odds ratios. The participants were divided into two subsets, a training dataset and a test dataset. Using the training dataset, logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, and support vector machine models were established, and important variables of each model were identified. The predictive abilities of the different models were compared.

RESULTS: The analysis showed that only earned income and company-related factors significantly affected return-to-original-work (RTOW). The random forest model showed the best accuracy among the tested machine learning models; however, the difference was not prominent.

CONCLUSION: It is possible to predict a worker's probability of RTOW using machine learning techniques with moderate accuracy.

Language: en

Keywords

Accidents, Occupational; Machine Learning; Return to Work