A hybrid super ensemble learning model for the early-stage prediction of diabetes risk

Diabetes mellitus has become a rapidly growing chronic health problem worldwide. There has been a noticeable increase in diabetes cases in the last two decades. Recent advances in ensemble machine learning methods play an important role in the early detection of diabetes mellitus. These methods are both faster and less costly than traditional methods. This study aims to propose a new super ensemble learning model to enable an early diagnosis of diabetes mellitus. Super learner is a cross-validation-based approach that makes better predictions by combining prediction results of more than one machine learning algorithm. The proposed super learner model was created with four base-learners (logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, gradient boosting) and a meta learner (support vector machines) as a result of a case study. Three different dataset were used to measure the robustness of the proposed model. Chi-square was determined as an optimal feature selection technique from five different techniques, and also hyper-parameter settings were made with GridSearch. Finally, the proposed new super learner model achieved to obtain the best accuracy results in the detection of Diabetes mellitus compared to the base-learners for the early-stage diabetes risk prediction (99.6%), PIMA (92%), and diabetes 130-US hospitals (98%) dataset, respectively. This study revealed that super learner algorithms can be effectively used in the detection of diabetes mellitus. Also, obtaining of the high and convincing statistical scores shows the robustness of the proposed super learner model.