Supervised Machine Learning-Based Models for Predicting Raised Blood Sugar

Raised blood sugar (hyperglycemia) is considered a strong indicator of prediabetes or diabetes mellitus. Diabetes mellitus is one of the most common non-communicable diseases (NCDs) affecting the adult population. Recently, the prevalence of diabetes has been increasing at a faster rate, especially in developing countries. The primary concern associated with diabetes is the potential for serious health complications to occur if it is not diagnosed early. Therefore, timely detection and screening of diabetes is considered a crucial factor in treating and controlling the disease. Population screening for raised blood sugar aims to identify individuals at risk before symptoms appear, enabling timely intervention and potentially improved health outcomes. However, implementing large-scale screening programs can be expensive, requiring testing, follow-up, and management resources, potentially straining healthcare systems. Given the above facts, this paper presents supervised machine-learning models to detect and predict raised blood sugar. The proposed raised blood sugar models utilize diabetes-related risk factors including age, body mass index (BMI), eating habits, physical activity, prevalence of other diseases, and fasting blood sugar obtained from the dataset of the STEPwise approach to NCD risk factor study collected from adults in the Palestinian community. The diabetes risk factor obtained from the STEPS dataset was used as input for building the prediction model that was trained using various types of supervised learning classification algorithms including random forest, decision tree, Adaboost, XGBoost, bagging decision trees, and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Based on the experimental results, the raised blood sugar models demonstrated optimal performance when implemented with a random forest classifier, yielding an accuracy of 98.4%. Followed by the bagging decision trees, XGBoost, MLP, AdaBoost, and decision tree with an accuracy of 97.4%, 96.4%, 96.3%, 95.2%, and 94.8%, respectively.