Data-Driven Machine-Learning Methods for Diabetes Risk Prediction

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic condition characterized by a disturbance in the metabolism of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. The most characteristic disorder in all forms of diabetes is hyperglycemia, i.e., elevated blood sugar levels. The modern way of life has significantly increased the incidence of diabetes. Therefore, early diagnosis of the disease is a necessity. Machine Learning (ML) has gained great popularity among healthcare providers and physicians due to its high potential in developing efficient tools for risk prediction, prognosis, treatment and the management of various conditions. In this study, a supervised learning methodology is described that aims to create risk prediction tools with high efficiency for type 2 diabetes occurrence. A features analysis is conducted to evaluate their importance and explore their association with diabetes. These features are the most common symptoms that often develop slowly with diabetes, and they are utilized to train and test several ML models. Various ML models are evaluated in terms of the Precision, Recall, F-Measure, Accuracy and AUC metrics and compared under 10-fold cross-validation and data splitting. Both validation methods highlighted Random Forest and K-NN as the best performing models in comparison to the other models.