The prediction of undiagnosed diabetes using lifestyle and anthropometric measures: Machine learning vs. Traditional statistical methods

Abstract Objective As delayed diagnosis of diabetes increases the risk of irreversible diabetes complications, detecting undiagnosed diabetes using a prediction model could be useful. Recently, machine learning-based disease prediction models have been used; however, the performance of the machine learning-based prediction model and traditional statistics-based prediction models in predicting undiagnosed diabetes has not been compared. Therefore, we developed a machine learning-based undiagnosed diabetes prediction model and compared its prediction performance with that of a traditional statistics-based prediction model. Methods We used the 2014–2020 Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) (N = 32,827). The KNHANES 2014–2018 data were used as training and internal validation sets and the 2019–2020 data as external validation sets. The receiver operating characteristic curve area under the curve (AUC) was used to compare the prediction performance of the machine learning-based and the traditional statistics-based prediction models. Results Using sex, age, resting heart rate, and waist circumference as features, the machine learning-based model showed a higher AUC (0.788 vs. 0.740) than that of the traditional statistical-based prediction model. Using sex, age, waist circumference, family history of diabetes, hypertension, alcohol consumption, and smoking status as features, the machine learning-based prediction model showed a higher AUC (0.802 vs. 0.759) than the traditional statistical-based prediction model. The machine learning-based prediction model using features for maximum prediction performance showed a higher AUC (0.819 vs. 0.765) than the traditional statistical-based prediction model. Conclusions machine learning-based prediction models using anthropometric and lifestyle measurements showed good performance in predicting undiagnosed diabetes. The machine learning-based prediction model outperformed the traditional statistics-based prediction models.