From Continuous Predictors to Clinical Thresholds: Early Evidence on Performance Trade-offs of Guideline-Based Categorisation for Ischaemic Stroke Outcome Prediction

Summary

Machine learning models achieve strong predictive accuracy for 90-day outcome prediction in acute ischaemic stroke, yet clinical adoption is limited by the misalignment of model explanations with clinicians' reasoning. Motivated by a clinician user study calling for clinical guideline-aligned cut-offs, we ask whether continuous predictors can be replaced by clinically informed categorical encodings without sacrificing performance. On a multi-centre European registry stratified into three treatment cohorts, we compare standard and fully categorised gradient-boosted models, the latter using stroke guideline-aligned, treatment-specific thresholds. The fully categorised models are statistically indistinguishable from their continuous counterparts in two of the treatment cohorts, with a significant drop in predictive accuracy in one cohort. Global feature importance rankings remain consistent, suggesting that discretising continuous predictors into guideline-based categories preserves the core hierarchy of prognostic factors across all treatment groups. Guideline-based categorisation is thus a viable design choice for stroke-outcome models.