From Data to Diagnosis: A Novel Deep Learning Model for Early and Accurate Diabetes Prediction

Background: Diabetes remains a major global health challenge, contributing significantly to premature mortality due to its potential progression to organ failure if not diagnosed early. Traditional diagnostic approaches are subject to human error, highlighting the need for modern computational techniques in clinical decision support systems. Although these systems have successfully integrated deep learning (DL) models, they still encounter several challenges, such as a lack of intricate pattern learning, imbalanced datasets, and poor interpretability of predictions. Methods: To address these issues, the temporal inception perceptron network (TIPNet), a novel DL model, is designed to accurately predict diabetes by capturing complex feature relationships and temporal dynamics. An adaptive synthetic oversampling strategy is utilized to reduce severe class imbalance in an extensive diabetes health indicators dataset consisting of 253,680 instances and 22 features, providing a diverse and representative sample for model evaluation. The model's performance and generalizability are assessed using a 10-fold cross-validation technique. To enhance interpretability, explainable artificial intelligence techniques are integrated, including local interpretable model-agnostic explanations and Shapley additive explanations, providing insights into the model's decision-making process. Results: Experimental results demonstrate that TIPNet achieves improvement scores of 3.53% in accuracy, 3.49% in F1-score, 1.14% in recall, and 5.95% in the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Conclusions: These findings indicate that TIPNet is a promising tool for early diabetes prediction, offering accurate and interpretable results. The integration of advanced DL modeling with oversampling strategies and explainable AI techniques positions TIPNet as a valuable resource for clinical decision support, paving the way for its future application in healthcare settings.