Diabetes Prediction by Optimizing the Nearest Neighbor Algorithm Using Genetic Algorithm

Introduction: Diabetes or diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder in body when the body does not produce insulin, and produced insulin cannot function normally. The presence of various signs and symptoms of this disease makes it difficult for doctors to diagnose. Data mining allows analysis of patients’ clinical data for medical decision making. The aim of this study was to provide a model for increasing the accuracy of diabetes prediction. Method: In this study, the medical records of 1151 patients with diabetes were studied, with 19 features. Patients’ information were collected from the UCI standard database. Each patient has been followed for at least one year. Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the nearest neighbor algorithm were used to provide diabetes prediction model. Results: It was revealed that the prediction accuracy of the proposed model equals 0.76. Also, for the methods of Naïve Bayes, Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network, and support vector machine (SVM), the prediction accuracy was 0.62, 0.65, and 0.75, respectively. Conclusion: In predicting diabetes, the proposed model has the lowest error rate and the highest accuracy compared to the other models. Naïve Bayes method has the highest error rate and the lowest accuracy.