Deep Learning Models for Type 2 Diabetes Detection in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

One of the predominant health issues affecting Saudi Arabia and leading to many complications is Type 2 diabetes (T2D). Early detection and significant preventative measures lead to curbing and controlling the health issue. There are fewer datasets in the literature for the detection of T2D in the Saudi population. Past studies using Saudi data have favoured machine learning algorithms to classify T2D. Although the application of this data in machine learning is evident, no studies exist in the literature that compare this data, especially those related to deep learning algorithms. This study's objective is to use specific Saudi data to develop multiple deep learning models that could be used to detect T2D. The research uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN), an Autoencoder (AE), and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to create predictive models and compare their performance with a traditional machine learning classifier used on the same dataset that outperformed other machine learning algorithms such as a Decision Forest (DF). Various metrics were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the models, such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score and area under the ROC curve (AUC) where the ROC acts as a receiver operating characteristic curve. There are two cases in this paper: (i) uses all features of the dataset and (ii) uses six of the ten features, such as DF. In case (i), the results were shown that AE outperformed other models with the highest accuracy for imbalanced and balanced data 81.12\% and 79.16\%, respectively. The results for case (ii) showed that AE scored the highest 81.01\% accuracy with imbalanced data compared to DF and DF achieved the highest accuracy of 82.1\% with balanced data. As a result, both cases explored in this study revealed that AE has a constant superior performance if imbalanced data is used. In contrast, DF demonstrated the highest accuracy when a balanced dataset was used with a feature set reduction. They help to identify the undiagnosed T2D, and they are essential for professionals in Saudi Arabia in the health sector to promote health connections, identify risks and contain or improve their diabetes management.