A Decisive Metaheuristic Attribute Selector Enabled Combined Unsupervised-Supervised Model for Chronic Disease Risk Assessment

Abstract

Advanced predictive analytics coupled with an effective attribute selection method plays a pivotal role in the precise assessment of chronic disorder risks in patients. Traditional attribute selection approaches suffer from premature convergence, high complexity, and computational cost. On the contrary, heuristic-based optimization to supervised methods minimizes the computational cost by eliminating outlier attributes. In this study, a novel buffer-enabled heuristic, a memory-based metaheuristic attribute selection (MMAS) model, is proposed, which performs a local neighborhood search for optimizing chronic disorders data. It is further filtered with unsupervised K-means clustering to remove outliers. The resultant data are input to the Naive Bayes classifier to determine chronic disease risks’ presence. Heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, and hepatitis are the datasets used in the research. Upon implementation of the model, a mean accuracy of 94.5% using MMAS was recorded and it dropped to 93.5% if clustering was not used. The average precision, recall, and F-score metric computed were 96.05%, 94.07%, and 95.06%, respectively. The model also has a least latency of 0.8 sec. Thus, it is demonstrated that chronic disease diagnosis can be significantly improved by heuristic-based attribute selection coupled with clustering followed by classification. It can be used to develop a decision support system to assist medical experts in the effective analysis of chronic diseases in a cost-effective manner.