Obesity prediction using machine learning techniques

Abstract

Currently, safeguarding the community is vital in terms of finding solution to health related problems which can be achieved through medical research using the advent of technology. Obesity has become worldwide health concern as it is becoming a threat to the future. It is the most common health problems all over the world. Thousands of diseases as well as risks and death are associated to it. An early prediction of a disease will help both doctors and patients to act and minimize if not total eradication of the root cause or work on preventing the disease symptom from further deterioration. Going through patient’s medical history is one of the methods of identifying a disease which most time consuming as processing manually and it comes with an error-prone analyses and expense. Therefore, there is need to scientifically develop a predicting model of the occurrence of the disease or its existence using an automated technique as it is becoming a need of the day. In this research work, we used machine learning techniques on a public clinical available dataset to predict obesity status using different machine learning algorithms. Five machine learning algorithms were applied. Gboost Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, Decision Tree Classifier, K-Nearest Neighbor and Support Vector Machine and the model has shown promising results with as Gboost classifier achieves the highest accuracy of 99.05% as compared to other classifiers. Meanwhile, the K-Nearest Neighbor gave the relatively strong accuracy of 95.74%.