MultiDMet: Designing a Hybrid Multidimensional Metrics Framework to Predictive Modeling for Performance Evaluation and Feature Selection

Abstract

In a competitive digital age where data volumes are increasing with time, the ability to extract meaningful knowledge from high-dimensional data using machine learning (ML) and data mining (DM) techniques and making decisions based on the extracted knowledge is becoming increasingly important in all business domains. Nevertheless, high-dimensional data remains a major challenge for classification algorithms due to its high computational cost and storage requirements. The 2016 Demographic and Health Survey of Ethiopia (EDHS 2016) used as the data source for this study which is publicly available contains several features that may not be relevant to the prediction task. In this paper, we developed a hybrid multidimensional metrics framework for predictive modeling for both model performance evaluation and feature selection to overcome the feature selection challenges and select the best model among the available models in DM and ML. The proposed hybrid metrics were used to measure the efficiency of the predictive models. Experimental results show that the decision tree algorithm is the most efficient model. The higher score of HMM (m, r) = 0.47 illustrates the overall significant model that encompasses almost all the user's requirements, unlike the classical metrics that use a criterion to select the most appropriate model. On the other hand, the ANNs were found to be the most computationally intensive for our prediction task. Moreover, the type of data and the class size of the dataset (unbalanced data) have a significant impact on the efficiency of the model, especially on the computational cost, and the interpretability of the parameters of the model would be hampered. And the efficiency of the predictive model could be improved with other feature selection algorithms (especially hybrid metrics) considering the experts of the knowledge domain, as the understanding of the business domain has a significant impact.