This is from Malcolm Kendrick’s book, The Clot Thickens. It’s the last study he uses.
They applied various machine learning techniques, and the best one was a neural network:
The top 10 risk factors are in Table 3, which I show in part below:
To get all the rankings, you have to go here:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/5380334/bin/pone.0174944.s001.docx
LDL is way down on the list. For the neural network, it was 46th. BMI was 43rd.
Also, I think the #1 risk factor in the “ML: Neural Networks” is wrong. It’s not “atrial fibrillation” but is instead “COPD” according to the downloaded Docx document.
Edit: One of the factors that is bad in every system is…age. Getting old apparently isn’t good. 