Determining the Critical Factors of Antenatal Care Follow-Up Using Two-Phase Machine Learning

Determining the critical factors affecting antenatal visits will greatly contribute to reducing maternal and infant mortality. This study, thus attempted to construct a cluster-based predictive model to determine the critical factors of antenatal care follow-up among women in Ethiopia using two-step machine learning techniques. The 5,990 preprocessed obstetric dataset with 13 selected attributes were used that was collected from the Dabat Research Center at the University of Gondar, Ethiopia. To solve the study problem, six cluster models were developed using K-means, Expectation Maximization and Make Density clustering algorithms, which are well-suited for analyzing health datasets, providing scalability, flexibility, robustness to noise, and the ability to handle uneven cluster sizes. K-means out-formers Density based and Expectation Maximization clustering algorithms with minimum number of sum of square errors (17094) and number of iteration (3). Then, output of the K-means cluster model was used as input to segment the dataset and build a total of 21 predictive models using the tree-based J48 classifier, PART and JRip rule generators while adjusting their parameters. The model for predicting antenatal care follow-up is constructed by induction of the truncated PART rule (accuracy of 99.93%) and extracts attributes of interest such as antenatal care attendance, antenatal care location, antenatal care frequency, current vaccination, woman’s age, and HIV testing to predict antenatal care follow-up in the study area.