Multi-Class Classification Method with Feature Engineering for Predicting Hypertension with Diabetes

Machine learning-based methods are widely applied for the prediction of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. However, few models have been developed for predicting hypertension with diabetes, even though these diseases generally co-occur and can cause devastating harm to patients. This paper proposes a multi-class classification method that will be able to predict hypertension with diabetes. The proposed method consists of data preprocessing, model construction and validation, and model comparison. For data preprocessing, feature engineering of corresponding data types is conducted. For model construction, several machine learning methods are applied, including Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting (GB), Extra Tree (ET), Decision Tree (DCT), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The dataset used in this study consists of 17,077 records and 28 features, obtained from Phaya Mengrai Hospital, Chiang Rai, Thailand. The predictive performance of each model with and without feature engineering is compared in terms of accuracy and average area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC-ROC). From the comparison results, SVM with feature engineering outperformed other models based on accuracy and average AUC-ROC achieving a value of 88.39% and 93.32%, respectively. For all ensemble learning-based methods, RF performed the best in terms of both accuracy and average AUC-ROC for both with and without feature engineering. Overall, all the models performed better when feature engineering was applied.