Hybrid waterwheel plant and stochastic fractal search optimization for robust diabetes classification

Diabetes is a chronic disease that is usually caused when the pancreas fails to produce sufficient insulin or when the body is unable to effectively utilize the insulin produced by the pancreas. Early detection of diabetes enables the implementation of a suitable treatment method, which can lead to a healthy lifestyle. A necessity arises for an automated system capable of diagnosing diabetes using clinical and physical data in cases when the conventional approach to detecting diabetes proves to be arduous. In this paper, a new diabetes classification model based on optimized long short-term memory (LSTM) is presented and evaluated on the Pima Indians Diabetes Database (PIDD). To improve the LSTM model, a novel hybrid waterwheel plant and stochastic fractal search (WWPASFS) is proposed for optimizing its parameters. To confirm the performance superiority of the proposed WWPASFS + LSTM model, it is compared to various machine learning models and metaheuristic optimization methods. In addition, the binary WWPASFS is proposed to extract the relevant features in the PIDD dataset, with the aim of improving the accurate classification of diabetes patients. The WWPASFS + LSTM model attained the highest accuracy of 98.2% in classifying diabetes patients on the dataset in hand. The WWPASFS + LSTM model exhibited superior performance compared to the other five models, namely decision tree, K-nearest neighbors, neural networks, random forest, and support vector machines. On the other hand, the statistical analysis of the proposed approach is studied and the results prove its difference and significance.