Handling imbalanced class problem of measles infectionrisk prediction model

Abstract

Measles is an emerging infectious disease with increasing number of reported cases. It is a vaccine-preventable disease;thus, it is common to have imbalanced class problem in the dataset. This study aims to resolve the imbalanced class problem for the prediction of measles infection risk and to compare the predictive results on a balanced dataset based on three machine learningtechniques. The data that was utilized in this study contained 37,884 records of suspected measles casesthat were highly imbalanced towards negative measles cases. The Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) was performed to balance thedistribution of the target attribute. The balanced dataset was then modelled using logistic regression, decision tree and Naïve Bayes. The predicted results indicated that logistic regression executed on the balanced dataset by SMOTE has the highest and most accurateclassification with 94.5% overall accuracy, 93.9% true positive rate, 5.8% false positive rate and 5.1% false negative rate. Therefore, SMOTE and other over-sampling approaches may be applicable to overcome imbalanced class issues in the medical dataset.