Predictive Models for the Medical Diagnosis of Dengue: A Case Study in Paraguay

Abstract

Early diagnosis of dengue continues to be a concern for public health in countries with a high incidence of this disease. In this work, we compared two machine learning techniques: artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM) as assistance tools for medical diagnosis. The performance of classification models was evaluated in a real dataset of patients with a previous diagnosis of dengue extracted from the public health system of Paraguay during the period 2012–2016. The ANN multilayer perceptron achieved better results with an average of 96% accuracy, 96% sensitivity, and 97% specificity, with low variation in thirty different partitions of the dataset. In comparison, SVM polynomial obtained results above 90% for accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.