COMBIO: Automated Discovery of a Compact Composite Biomarker from Routine Laboratory Panels
Machine-learning models based on routine laboratory panels can predict outcomes but can be difficult to interpret and operationalize. We present COMBIO, an automated pipeline that distils such a model into a compact closed-form biomarker. The composite is a product of laboratory measurements raised to integer powers from minus two to two. The sign of each exponent indicates whether higher values of the corresponding measurement increase or decrease the composite. Shapley additive explanation values from the gradient-boosted reference model rank five candidate measurements and guide eligible exponent signs. An exhaustive search over small integer exponents selects the formula on an inner validation set, before evaluation on the reserved test set. We evaluated COMBIO across six tasks: three National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey outcomes, liver-disease classification in the Indian Liver Patient Dataset, and Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV in-hospital mortality and sepsis case-finding, with external evaluation in the eICU Collaborative Research Database for the two hospital tasks. Across the six test sets, COMBIO's area under the receiver operating characteristic curve differed by at most 0.03 from logistic regression using the five candidate laboratory measurements. The hospital mortality composite had an area under the curve of 0.698 in the external database. A version restricted to widely available measurements in the source hospital database achieved an area under the curve of 0.786 in a cohort covering 92% of admissions. The multiplicative representation provides compactness rather than additional accuracy, and local validation and recalibration are required before clinical use.