Prediction and Diagnosis of Diabetes Mellitus using a Water Wave Optimization Algorithm

Data mining is an appropriate way to discover the information and hidden patterns in large amounts of data, where the hidden patterns cannot be easily discovered in normal ways. One of the most interesting applications of data mining is the discovery of diseases and disease patterns through investigating the patients' records. Early diagnosis of diabetes can reduce the effects of this devastating disease. A common way to diagnose this disease is to perform a blood test, which, despite its high precision, has some disadvantages such as: pain, cost, patient stress, and lack of access to a laboratory. Diabetic patients’ information has hidden patterns, which can help you investigate the risk of diabetes in individuals without performing a blood test. The use of neural networks, as powerful data mining tools, is an appropriate method to discover hidden patterns in diabetic patients’ information. In this work, in order to discover the hidden patterns and diagnose diabetes, a water wave optimization (WWO) algorithm, as a precise metaheuristic algorithm, was used along with a neural network to increase the precision of diabetes prediction. The results of our implementation in the MATLAB programming environment using the dataset related to diabetes indicated that the proposed method was capable of diagnosing diabetes at a precision of 94.73%, a sensitivity of 94.20%, a specificity of 93.34%, and an accuracy of 95.46%, and was more sensitive than the methods like support vector machines, artificial neural networks, and decision trees.