Background: To predict and make an early diagnosis of diabetes is a critical approach in a population with high risk of diabetes, one of the devastating diseases globally. Traditional and conventional blood tests are recommended for screening the suspected patients; however, applying these tests could have health side effects and expensive cost. The goal of this study was to establish a simple and reliable predictive model based on the risk factors associated with diabetes using a decision tree algorithm.
Methods: A retrospective cross-sectional study was used in this study. A total of 10,436 participants who had a health check-up from January 2017 to July 2017 were recruited. With appropriate data mining approaches, 3454 participants remained in the final dataset for further analysis. Seventy percent of these participants (2420 cases) were then randomly allocated to either the training dataset for the construction of the decision tree or the testing dataset (30%, 1034 cases) for evaluation of the performance of the decision tree. For this purpose, the cost-sensitive J48 algorithm was used to develop the decision tree model.
Results: Utilizing all the key features of the dataset consisting of 14 input variables and two output variables, the constructed decision tree model identified several key factors that are closely linked to the development of diabetes and are also modifiable. Furthermore, our model achieved an accuracy of classification of 90.3% with a precision of 89.7% and a recall of 90.3%.
Conclusion: By applying simple and cost-effective classification rules, our decision tree model estimates the development of diabetes in a high-risk adult Chinese population with strong potential for implementation of diabetes management.
Keywords: diabetes, J48 algorithm, decision tree, risk factors