Prediction of Diabetes Using Data Mining and Machine Learning Algorithms: A Cross-Sectional Study

Objectives: This study aimed to develop a model to predict fasting blood glucose status using machine learning and data mining, since the early diagnosis and treatment of diabetes can improve outcomes and quality of life. Methods: This crosssectional study analyzed data from 3376 adults over 30 years old at 16 comprehensive health service centers in Tehran, Iran who participated in a diabetes screening program. The dataset was balanced using random sampling and the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE). The dataset was split into training set (80%) and test set (20%). Shapley values were calculated to select the most important features. Noise analysis was performed by adding Gaussian noise to the numerical features to evaluate the robustness of feature importance. Five different machine learning algorithms, including CatBoost, random forest, XGBoost, logistic regression, and an artificial neural network, were used to model the dataset. Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, the F1-score, and the area under the curve were used to evaluate the model. Results: Age, waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and systolic blood pressure were the most important factors for predicting fasting blood glucose status. Though the models achieved similar predictive ability, the CatBoost model performed slightly better overall with 0.737 area under the curve (AUC). Conclusions: A gradient boosted decision tree model accurately identified the most important risk factors related to diabetes. Age, waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and systolic blood pressure were the most important risk factors for diabetes, respectively. This model can support planning for diabetes management and prevention.