Diagnosis of Chronic Kidney Disease Using Effective Classification Algorithms and Recursive Feature Elimination Techniques

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is among the top 20 causes of death worldwide and affects approximately 10% of the world adult population. CKD is a disorder that disrupts normal kidney function. Due to the increasing number of people with CKD, effective prediction measures for the early diagnosis of CKD are required. The novelty of this study lies in developing the diagnosis system to detect chronic kidney diseases. This study assists experts in exploring preventive measures for CKD through early diagnosis using machine learning techniques. This study focused on evaluating a dataset collected from 400 patients containing 24 features. The mean and mode statistical analysis methods were used to replace the missing numerical and the nominal values. To choose the most important features, Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) was applied. Four classification algorithms applied in this study were support vector machine (SVM), <i>k</i>-nearest neighbors (KNN), decision tree, and random forest. All the classification algorithms achieved promising performance. The random forest algorithm outperformed all other applied algorithms, reaching an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 100% for all measures. CKD is a serious life-threatening disease, with high rates of morbidity and mortality. Therefore, artificial intelligence techniques are of great importance in the early detection of CKD. These techniques are supportive of experts and doctors in early diagnosis to avoid developing kidney failure.