• Jongin Lee and Hyoung-Ryoul Kim.
• Cheongsong Health Center and County Hospital, Cheongsong, Korea.
• J. Korean Med. Sci. 2018 May 7; 33 (19): e144.

BackgroundMany 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.MethodsAn 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.ResultsThe 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.ConclusionIt is possible to predict a worker's probability of RTOW using machine learning techniques with moderate accuracy.

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