Early Diabetes Prediction: A Comparative Study Using Machine Learning Techniques

Most screening tests for Diabetes Mellitus (DM) in use today were developed using electronically collected data from Electronic Health Record (EHR). However, developing and under-developing countries are still struggling to build EHR in their hospitals. Due to the lack of HER data, early screening tools are not available for those countries. This study develops a prediction model for early DM by direct questionnaires for a tertiary hospital in Bangladesh. Information gain technique was used to reduce irreverent features. Using selected variables, we developed logistic regression, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor, Naïve Bayes, random forest (RF), and neural network models to predict diabetes at an early stage. RF outperformed other machine learning algorithms achieved 100% accuracy. These findings suggest that a combination of simple questionnaires and a machine learning algorithm can be a powerful tool to identify undiagnosed DM patients.