An integrated data mining algorithms and meta-heuristic technique to predict the readmission risk of diabetic patients

Reducing hospital readmission rate is a significant challenge in the healthcare industry for managers and policymakers seeking to improve healthcare and lower costs. This study integrates data mining and meta-heuristic techniques to predict the early readmission probability of diabetic patients within 30 days of discharge. The research dataset was obtained from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository, including 101765 instances with 50 features representing patient and hospital outcomes, collected from 130 US hospitals. After data preprocessing, including cleansing, sampling, and normalization, a Chi-square analysis is done to confirm and rank the 20 identified factors affecting the readmission risk. As the algorithms' performance could vary based on the features’ characteristics, several classification algorithms, including a Random Forest (RF), Neural Network (NN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM), are employed. Moreover, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is integrated into the SVM algorithm, called GA-SVM, for hyper-parameter tuning and increasing the prediction accuracy. The performance of the models was evaluated using accuracy, recall, precision, and f-measure metrics. The results indicate that the accuracy of RF, GA-SVM, SVM, and NN are calculated respectively as 74.04 %, 73.52 %, 72.40 %, and 70.44 %. Using GA to adjust c and gamma hyper-parameters led to a 1.12 % increase in SVM prediction accuracy. In response to increasing demand and considering poor hospital conditions, particularly during epidemics, these findings point out the potential benefits of a more tailored methodology in managing diabetic patients.