Mining Significant Features of Diabetes Mellitus Applying Decision Trees: A Case Study In Bangladesh

Abstract

Diabetes is a chronic condition which is associated with an abnormally high level of sugar in the blood. It is a lifelong disease that causes harmful effects in human life. The goal of this research is to predict the severity of diabetes and find out significant features of it. In this work, we gathered diabetes patients records from Noakhali Diabetes Association, Noakhali, Bangladesh. Thus, We preprocessed our raw dataset by replacing and removing missing and wrong records respectively. Thus, CDT, J48, NBTree and REPtree decision tree based classification techniques were used to analyze this dataset. After this analysis, we evaluated classification outcomes of these decision tree classifiers and found the best decision tree model from them. In this work, CDT unpruned tree shows highest accuracy, precision, recall, f-measure, second highest AUROC and lowest RMSE than other models. Then, we extracted possible rules and significant features from this model and plasma glucose, plasma glucose 2hr after glucose and HDL-cholesterol have been found as the most significant features to predict the severity of Diabetes Mellitus. We hope this work will be beneficial to build a predictive system and complementary tool for diabetes treatment in future.