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BackgroundHypertension is the most common modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular diseases in South Asia. Machine learning (ML) models have been shown to outperform clinical risk predictions compared to statistical methods, but studies using ML to predict hypertension at the population level are lacking. This study used ML approaches in a dataset of three South Asian countries to predict hypertension and its associated factors and compared the model's performances.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective study using ML analyses to detect hypertension using population-based surveys. We created a single dataset by harmonizing individual-level data from the most recent nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. The variables included blood pressure (BP), sociodemographic and economic factors, height, weight, hemoglobin, and random blood glucose. Hypertension was defined based on JNC-7 criteria. We applied six common ML-based classifiers: decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), gradient boosting machine (GBM), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), logistic regression (LR), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to predict hypertension and its risk factors.ResultsOf the 8,18,603 participants, 82,748 (10.11%) had hypertension. ML models showed that significant factors for hypertension were age and BMI. Ever measured BP, education, taking medicine to lower BP, and doctor's perception of high BP was also significant but comparatively lower than age and BMI. XGBoost, GBM, LR, and LDA showed the highest accuracy score of 90%, RF and DT achieved 89 and 83%, respectively, to predict hypertension. DT achieved the precision value of 91%, and the rest performed with 90%. XGBoost, GBM, LR, and LDA achieved a recall value of 100%, RF scored 99%, and DT scored 90%. In F1-score, XGBoost, GBM, LR, and LDA scored 95%, while RF scored 94%, and DT scored 90%. All the algorithms performed with good and small log loss values <6%.ConclusionML models performed well to predict hypertension and its associated factors in South Asians. When employed on an open-source platform, these models are scalable to millions of people and might help individuals self-screen for hypertension at an early stage. Future studies incorporating biochemical markers are needed to improve the ML algorithms and evaluate them in real life.

Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is a chronic disease characterized by abnormally high blood glucose levels due to insulin resistance and reduced pancreatic insulin production. The challenge of this work is to identify T2D-associated features that can distinguish T2D sub-types for prognosis and treatment purposes. We thus employed machine learning (ML) techniques to categorize T2D patients using data from the Pima Indian Diabetes Dataset from the Kaggle ML repository. After data preprocessing, several feature selection techniques were used to extract feature subsets, and a range of classification techniques were used to analyze these. We then compared the derived classification results to identify the best classifiers by considering accuracy, kappa statistics, area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC), sensitivity, specificity, and logarithmic loss (logloss). To evaluate the performance of different classifiers, we investigated their outcomes using the summary statistics with a resampling distribution. Therefore, Generalized Boosted Regression modeling showed the highest accuracy (90.91%), followed by kappa statistics (78.77%) and specificity (85.19%). In addition, Sparse Distance Weighted Discrimination, Generalized Additive Model using LOESS and Boosted Generalized Additive Models also gave the maximum sensitivity (100%), highest AUROC (95.26%) and lowest logarithmic loss (30.98%) respectively. Notably, the Generalized Additive Model using LOESS was the top-ranked algorithm according to non-parametric Friedman testing. Of the features identified by these machine learning models, glucose levels, body mass index, diabetes pedigree function, and age were consistently identified as the best and most frequently accurate outcome predictors. These results indicate the utility of ML methods in constructing improved prediction models for T2D and successfully identified outcome predictors for this Pima Indian population.