Supervised Machine Learning based Ensemble Model for Accurate Prediction of Type 2 Diabetes

According to the American Diabetes Association(ADA), 30.3 million people in the United States have diabetes, but only 7.2 million may be undiagnosed and unaware of their condition. Type 2 diabetes is usually diagnosed for most patients later on in life whereas the less common Type 1 diabetes is diagnosed early on in life. People can live healthy and happy lives while living with diabetes, but early detection produces a better overall outcome on most patient's health. Thus, to test the accurate prediction of Type 2 diabetes, we use the patients' information from an electronic health records company called Practice Fusion, which has about 10,000 patient records from 2009 to 2012. This data contains individual key biometrics, including age, diastolic and systolic blood pressure, gender, height, and weight. We use this data on popular machine learning algorithms and for each algorithm, we evaluate the performance of every model based on their classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity/recall, negative predictive value, and F1 score. In our study, we find that all algorithms other than Naive Bayes suffered from very low precision. Hence, we take a step further and incorporate all the algorithms into a weighted average or soft voting ensemble model where each algorithm will count towards a majority vote towards the decision outcome of whether a patient has diabetes or not. The accuracy of the Ensemble model on Practice Fusion is 85%, by far our ensemble approach is new in this space. We firmly believe that the weighted average ensemble model not only performed well in overall metrics but also helped to recover wrong predictions and aid in accurate prediction of Type 2 diabetes. Our accurate novel model can be used as an alert for the patients to seek medical evaluation in time.