A system, methods, and computer-readable media are provided for the automatic identification of patients having an elevated near-term risk of pulmonary function deterioration or respiratory distress. Embodiments of the invention are directed to event prediction, risk stratification, and optimization of the assessment, communication, and decision-making to prevent respiratory events in humans, and in one embodiment take the form of a platform for wearable, mobile, untethered monitoring devices with embedded decision support. Respiratory information is obtained over one or a plurality of previous time intervals, to classify a likelihood of events leading to an acute respiratory decompensation event within a future time interval. In an embodiment, the risk prediction is based a plurality of nonlinearity measures of capnometry information over the previous time interval(s), and the risk for an acute respiratory decompensation event determined using an ensemble model predictor on the nonlinearity measures.