Explainable artificial intelligence-driven ensemble learning for asthma risk prediction using machine and deep...

ObjectiveAsthma, a chronic respiratory condition characterized by airway inflammation and constriction, affects millions of individuals worldwide, resulting in high healthcare expenses and a lower quality of life. Early prediction and control of asthma risk are critical for avoiding exacerbations and improving outcomes.MethodsIn this study, we describe a comprehensive asthma prediction model that uses machine learning and deep learning techniques to estimate asthma risk based on a variety of health and environmental parameters. Recursive feature elimination and Extra Trees Classifier were used to choose features, and the synthetic minority over-sampling approach was used to balance the dataset to overcome class imbalance. Hyperparameter tuning was used to optimize performance for 12 machine learning models such as extreme gradient boosting, Random Forest, and support vector machine as well as deep learning models, including multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural network, and artificial neural network.ResultsAfter hyperparameter adjustment, ensemble approaches that used both hard and soft voting were evaluated. When hyperparameter adjustment was used, the soft voting ensemble that combined XGBoost and CatBoost achieved the highest accuracy (93.61%). Shapley additive explanations and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations were employed to make predictions interpretable, providing information on feature contributions and boosting clinician confidence. A Flask server and web interface were also deployed, enabling real-time user interaction where patients and medical professionals could enter data and obtain asthma risk estimations immediately.ConclusionsThis study presents an accurate and explainable asthma risk prediction framework using ensemble machine and deep learning models, achieving 93.61% accuracy with real-time clinical applicability.