A Comparative Study on Machine Learning Models to Classify Diseases Based on Patient Behaviour and Habits
Authors: Musaaed Elham , Hewah Nabil , Alasaadi Abdulla 
Published: April 2024

In recent years, ML algorithms have been shown to be useful for predicting diseases based on health data and posed a potential application area for these algorithms such as modeling of diseases. The majority of these applications employ supervised rather than unsupervised ML algorithms. In addition, each year, the amount of data in medical science grows rapidly. Moreover, these data include clinical and Patient-Related Factors (PRF), such as height, weight, age, other physical characteristics, blood sugar, lipids, insulin, etc., all of which will change continually over time. Analysis of historical data can help identify disease risk factors and their interactions, which is useful for disease diagnosis and prediction. This wealth of valuable information in these data will help doctors diagnose accurately and people can become more aware of the risk factors and key indicators to act proactively. The purpose of this study is to use six supervised ML approaches to fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive experiment to investigate the correlation between PRF and Diabetes, Stroke, Heart Disease (HD), and Kidney Disease (KD). Moreover, it will investigate the link between Diabetes, Stroke, and KD and PRF with HD. Further, the research aims to compare and evaluate various ML algorithms for classifying diseases based on the PRF. Additionally, it aims to compare and evaluate ML algorithms for classifying HD based on PRF as well as Diabetes, Stroke, Asthma, Skin Cancer, and KD as attributes. Lastly, HD predictions will be provided through a Web-based application on the most accurate classifier, which allows the users to input their values and predict the output. Logistic Regression (LR), Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Extreme Gradient Boost (XGB), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were the algorithms used. The dataset was obtained from the Kaggle repository. The attributes are divided into PRF and diseases. The selected algorithms were implemented on the dataset with the optimal hyperparameters determined by using the “GridsearchCV” method in order to obtain the best performance. The accuracy of the algorithms ranged from 70% to 76%. Based on the accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score measures for all algorithms, all ML algorithms predicted HD more accurately than diabetes, strokes, and KD. The algorithms even performed better when predefined diseases were combined with PRF in order to predict HD. Although there was no significant difference between the algorithms, LR achieved the highest score with 75%, when using only PRF and 76% when using a combination of disease attributes and PRF using a 70/30 split. Furthermore, accuracy increased from 74.8 to 76% when using the 10-fold CV. Two conclusions have been drawn: these features are more closely related to HD compared to other diseases and can be useful in predicting HD more proactively. Furthermore, the risk of HD increases with the presence of predefined diseases, especially Diabetes and Stroke. In terms of performance, LR was always one of the superior classifiers that performed similarly to more complex Machine Learning algorithms, while NB performed the worst.