Background: While psychological treatments are effective, a substantial portion of patients do not benefit enough. Early identification of those may allow for adaptive treatment strategies and improved outcomes. We aimed to evaluate the clinical usefulness of machine-learning (ML) models predicting outcomes in Internet-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, to compare ML-related methodological choices, and guide future use of these. Methods: Eighty main models were compared. Baseline variables, weekly symptoms, and treatment activity were used to predict treatment outcomes in a dataset of 6695 patients from regular care. Results: We show that the best models use handpicked predictors and impute missing data. No ML algorithm shows clear superiority. They have a mean balanced accuracy of 78.1% at treatment week four, closely matched by regression (77.8%). Conclusions: ML surpasses the benchmark for clinical usefulness (67%). Advanced and simple models perform equally, indicating a need for more data or smarter methodological designs to confirm advantages of ML.
This work was mainly supported by The Swedish Research Council (VR), The Erling Persson family foundation (EP-Stiftelsen), and The Swedish ALF agreement between the Swedish government and the county councils, with additional funding by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF), Psykiatrifonden, and Thuring's Foundation. The funding sources were not involved in any part of the study.