A comparative study of machine learning classifiers for risk prediction of asthma disease

Asthma is a chronic disease characterized by wheezing, chest tightening and difficulty in breathing due to inflammation of lung airways. Early risk prediction of asthma is crucial for proper and effective management. This study presents the use of machine learning approach for risk prediction of asthma by evaluating Raman spectral variations between asthmatic as well as healthy sera samples. Specifically, Raman spectra from 150 asthma and 52 healthy control blood sera samples were acquired. Spectral analyses illustrated significant spectral variations (p < 0.0001) in the asthmatic samples when compared with healthy sera. The existing spectral differences were further exploited by using artificial neural network (ANN) along with support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) algorithms towards machine-assisted classification of the two groups. Quantitative comparison of the evaluation metrics of the classification algorithms showed superior performance of SVM model. Our results indicate that Raman spectroscopy in tandem with SVM can be used in the diagnosis and machine-assisted classification of asthma patients with promising accuracy.