Development of a machine learning model related to explore the association between heavy metal exposure and alveolar bone loss among US adults utilizing SHAP: a study based on NHANES 2015–2018

作者：Jiayi Chen · 发表于：BMC Public Health · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1186/s12889-025-21658-y · 被引用次数：6 · 研究领域：Heavy Metal Exposure and Toxicity、Oral microbiology and periodontitis research、Heavy metals in environment

BACKGROUND: Alveolar bone loss (ABL) is common in modern society. Heavy metal exposure is usually considered to be a risk factor for ABL. Some studies revealed a positive trend found between urinary heavy metals and periodontitis using multiple logistic regression and Bayesian kernel machine regression. Overfitting using kernel function, long calculation period, the definition of prior distribution and lack of rank of heavy metal will affect the performance of the statistical model. Optimal model on this topic still remains controversy. This study aimed: (1) to develop an algorithm for exploring the association between heavy metal exposure and ABL; (2) filter the actual causal variables and investigate how heavy metals were associated with ABL; and (3) identify the potential risk factors for ABL. METHODS: Data were collected from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 2015 and 2018 to develop a machine learning (ML) model. Feature selection was performed using the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression with 10-fold cross-validation. The selected data were balanced using the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and divided into a training set and testing set at a 3:1 ratio. Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), and XGboost were used to construct the ML model. Accuracy, Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AU...