Optimal Risk Scores for Continuous Predictors

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Optimization formulation to construct a risk score, where we optimize the logistic loss with sparsity constraints. Previous approaches are typically designed to handle binary datasets, where continuous predictor variables are discretized in a preprocessing step by using arbitrary thresholds, such as quantiles. In contrast, we allow the model to decide for each continuous predictor variable the particular threshold that is critical for prediction. The usefulness of the resulting optimization problem is tested in synthetic datasets.