A Novel Explainable Deep Learning Framework for Accurate Diabetes Mellitus Prediction

Diabetes, a chronic condition caused by insufficient insulin production in the pancreas, presents significant health risks. Its increasing global prevalence necessitates the development of accurate and efficient predictive algorithms to support timely diagnosis. While recent advancements in deep learning (DL) have demonstrated potential for diabetes prediction, conventional models face limitations in handling class imbalance, capturing complex feature interactions, and providing interpretability for clinical decision-making. This paper proposes a DL framework for diabetes mellitus prediction. The framework ensures high predictive accuracy by integrating advanced preprocessing, effective class balancing, and a novel EchoceptionNet model. An analysis was conducted on a diabetes prediction dataset obtained from Kaggle, comprising nine features and 100,000 instances. The dataset is characterized by severe class imbalance, which is effectively addressed using a proximity-weighted synthetic oversampling technique, ensuring balanced class distribution. EchoceptionNet demonstrated notable performance improvements over state-of-the-art deep learning models, achieving a 4.39% increase in accuracy, 8.99% in precision, 2.19% in recall, 5.55% in F1-score, and a 7.77% in area under the curve score. Model robustness and generalizability were validated through 10-fold cross-validation, demonstrating consistent performance across diverse data splitting. To enhance clinical applicability, EchoceptionNet integrates explainable artificial intelligence techniques, Shapley additive explanations, and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations. These methods provide transparency by identifying the critical importance of features in the model’s predictions. EchoceptionNet exhibits superior predictive accuracy and ensures interpretability and reliability, making it a robust solution for accurate diabetes prediction.