Comparison of various classification algorithms in the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in Iran

In today's medical world, data on symptoms of patients with various diseases are so widespread, that analysis and consideration of all factors is merely not possible by a person (doctor). Therefore, the need for an intelligent system to consider the various factors and identify a suitable model between the different parameters is evident. Knowledge of data mining, as the foundation of such systems, has played a vital role in the advancement of medical sciences, especially in diagnosis of various diseases. Type 2 diabetes is one of these diseases, which has increased in recent years, which if diagnosed late can lead to serious complications. In this paper, several data mining methods and algorithms have been used and applied to a set of screening data for type 2 diabetes in Tabriz, Iran. The performance of methods such as support vector machine, artificial neural network, decision tree, nearest neighbors, and Bayesian network has been compared in an effort to find the best algorithm for diagnosing this disease. Artificial neural network with an accuracy rate of 97.44 % has the best performance on the chosen dataset. Accuracy rates for support vector machine, decision tree, 5-nearest neighbor, and Bayesian network are 81.19, 95.03, 90.85, and 91.60 %, respectively. The results of the simulations show that the effectiveness of various classification techniques on a dataset depends on the application, as well as the nature and complexity of the dataset used. Moreover, it is not always possible to say that a classification technique will always have the best performance. Therefore, in cases where data mining is used for diagnosis or prediction of diseases, consultation with specialists is inevitable, for selecting the number and type of dataset parameters to obtain the best possible results.