Diabetes prediction using ensembling of different machine learning classifiers

Diabetes, also known as chronic illness, is a group of metabolic diseases due to a high level of sugar in the blood over a long period. The risk factor and severity of diabetes can be reduced significantly if the precise early prediction is possible. The robust and accurate prediction of diabetes is highly challenging due to the limited number of labeled data and also the presence of outliers (or missing values) in the diabetes datasets. In this literature, we are proposing a robust framework for diabetes prediction where the outlier rejection, filling the missing values, data standardization, feature selection, K-fold cross-validation, and different Machine Learning (ML) classifiers (k-nearest Neighbour, Decision Trees, Random Forest, AdaBoost, Naive Bayes, and XGBoost) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) were employed. The weighted ensembling of different ML models is also proposed, in this literature, to improve the prediction of diabetes where the weights are estimated from the corresponding Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) of the ML model. AUC is chosen as the performance metric, which is then maximized during hyperparameter tuning using the grid search technique. All the experiments, in this literature, were conducted under the same experimental conditions using the Pima Indian Diabetes Dataset. From all the extensive experiments, our proposed ensembling classifier is the best performing classifier with the sensitivity, specificity, false omission rate, diagnostic odds ratio, and AUC as 0.789, 0.934, 0.092, 66.234, and 0.950 respectively which outperforms the state-of-the-art results by 2.00 % in AUC. Our proposed framework for the diabetes prediction outperforms the other methods discussed in the article. It can also provide better results on the same dataset which can lead to better performance in diabetes prediction. Our source code for diabetes prediction is made publicly available.