Clinical Decision Support System for Diabetic Patients by Predicting Type 2 Diabetes Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Diabetes is one of the most serious chronic diseases that result in high blood sugar levels. Early prediction can significantly diminish the potential jeopardy and severity of diabetes. In this study, different machine learning (ML) algorithms were applied to predict whether an unknown sample had diabetes or not. However, the main significance of this research was to provide a clinical decision support system (CDSS) by predicting type 2 diabetes using different ML algorithms. For the research purpose, the publicly available Pima Indian Diabetes (PID) dataset was used. Data preprocessing, K-fold cross-validation, hyperparameter tuning, and various ML classifiers such as K-nearest neighbor (KNN), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM), and histogram-based gradient boosting (HBGB) were used. Several scaling methods were also used to improve the accuracy of the result. For further research, a rule-based approach was used to escalate the effectiveness of the system. After that, the accuracy of DT and HBGB was above 90%. Based on this result, the CDSS was implemented where users can give the required input parameters through a web-based user interface to get decision support with some analytical results for the individual patient. The CDSS, which was implemented, will be beneficial for physicians and patients to make decisions about diabetes diagnosis and offer real-time analysis-based suggestions to improve medical quality. For future work, if daily data of a diabetic patient can be put together, then a better clinical support system can be implemented for daily decision support for patients worldwide.