A stacked ensemble machine learning approach for the prediction of diabetes

Objectives Diabetes has become a leading cause of mortality in both developed and developing countries, impacting a growing number of individuals worldwide. As the prevalence of the disease continues to rise, researchers have diligently worked towards developing accurate diabetes prediction models. The primary aim of this study is to utilize a diverse set of machine learning algorithms to detect the presence of diabetes, particularly in females, at an early stage. By leveraging these methods, this research seeks to provide physicians with valuable tools to identify the disease early, enabling timely interventions and improving patient outcomes. Methods In this study, some state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, such as random forest classifiers with gridsearchCV, XGBoost, NGBoost, Bagging, LightGBM, and AdaBoost classifiers, were employed. These models were chosen as the base layer of our proposed stacked ensemble model because of their high accuracy. Before feeding the data into the models, the dataset was preprocessed to ensure optimal performance and obtain improved results. Results The accuracy achieved in this study was 92.91%, which demonstrates its competitiveness with the existing approaches. Moreover, the utilization of the Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) facilitated the interpretation of machine learning models. Conclusion We anticipate that these findings will be beneficial to healthcare providers, stakeholders, students, and researchers involved in diabetes prediction research and development.