Average Weighted Objective Distance-Based Method for Type 2 Diabetes Prediction

Early detection of Type 2 diabetes is necessary for its prevention. The prediction models for detection systems normally employ common factors that may not properly fit all persons having different health conditions. Therefore, this study proposes a method for type 2 diabetes prediction with factors representing personal health conditions. More specifically, this study proposes a novel prediction method named Average Weighted Objective Distance (AWOD) based on the assumption that the individual has diverse health conditions resulting from different individual factors, a requirement for an effective prediction model. AWOD is a modification of Weighted Objective Distance (WOD) by applying information gain to reveal significant and insignificant individual factors having different priorities, which are represented by different weights. For AWOD, the data set is divided into a training set used to determine all relevant thresholds and constant values required for AWOD calculation and the testing set. In particular, AWOD is designed for binary classification problems with a relatively small dataset. To validate the proposed method, two datasets from open sources, Pima Indians Diabetes (Dataset 1) and Mendeley Data for Diabetes (Dataset 2) each containing 392 records, were studied. The prediction performance for both datasets is compared with the machine learning-based prediction methods, including K-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, Random Forest, and Deep Learning. The comparison results showed that the proposed method provided 93.22% and 98.95% accuracy for Dataset 1 and Dataset 2, respectively, which are higher than those provided by other machine learning-based methods.