A deep neural network prediction method for diabetes based on Kendall’s correlation coefficient and attention mechanism

by Xiaobo Qi, Yachen Lu, Ying Shi, Hui Qi, Lifang Ren

Diabetes is a chronic disease, which is characterized by abnormally high blood sugar levels. It may affect various organs and tissues, and even lead to life-threatening complications. Accurate prediction of diabetes can significantly reduce its incidence. However, the current prediction methods struggle to accurately capture the essential characteristics of nonlinear data, and the black-box nature of these methods hampers its clinical application. To address these challenges, we propose KCCAM_DNN, a diabetes prediction method that integrates Kendall’s correlation coefficient and an attention mechanism within a deep neural network. In the KCCAM_DNN, Kendall’s correlation coefficient is initially employed for feature selection, which effectively filters out key features influencing diabetes prediction. For missing values in the data, polynomial regression is utilized for imputation, ensuring data completeness. Subsequently, we construct a deep neural network (KCCAM_DNN) based on the self-attention mechanism, which assigns greater weight to crucial features affecting diabetes and enhances the model’s predictive performance. Finally, we employ the SHAP model to analyze the impact of each feature on diabetes prediction, augmenting the model’s interpretability. Experimental results show that KCCAM_DNN exhibits superior performance on both PIMA Indian and LMCH diabetes datasets, achieving test accuracies of 99.090% and 99.333%, respectively, approximately 2% higher than the best existing method. These results suggest that KCCAM_DNN is proficient in diabetes prediction, providing a foundation for informed decision-making in the diagnosis and prevention of diabetes.