SM-RuleMiner: Spider monkey based rule miner using novel fitness function for diabetes classification

Diabetes is a major health challenge around the world. Existing rule-based classification systems have been widely used for diabetes diagnosis, even though they must overcome the challenge of producing a comprehensive optimal ruleset while balancing accuracy, sensitivity and specificity values. To resolve this drawback, in this paper, a Spider Monkey Optimization-based rule miner (SM-RuleMiner) has been proposed for diabetes classification. A novel fitness function has also been incorporated into SM-RuleMiner to generate a comprehensive optimal ruleset while balancing accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. The proposed rule-miner is compared against three rule-based algorithms, namely ID3, C4.5 and CART, along with several meta-heuristic-based rule mining algorithms, on the Pima Indians Diabetes dataset using 10-fold cross validation. It has been observed that the proposed rule miner outperforms several well-known algorithms in terms of average classification accuracy and average sensitivity. Moreover, the proposed rule miner outperformed the other algorithms in terms of mean rule length and mean ruleset size.