Enhancing hypertension prediction: a hybrid machine learning optimization approach

Abstract

Early identification of hypertension is crucial to prevent its serious complications, which can lead to devastating health effects by threatening lifestyle quality and significantly increasing premature mortality. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of machine learning techniques in predicting the presence of hypertension from an unbalanced dataset consisting of 4,363 records and 35 features. To balance the dataset, we employed the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) algorithm. In addition, to select the most relevant features, we used ant colony optimization. Next, we applied various algorithms, including logistic regression (LR), K-nearest neighbors (KNNs), support vector machine (SVM), extra trees (ETs), and AdaBoost (AB). We also evaluated the optimization of hyperparameters using two methods: Bayesian optimization (BO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The results reveal that the combination of AB with BO demonstrated superior performance, with an accuracy of 97.60%, a recall of 98.93%, and a precision of 98.59%. This research emphasizes the potential of machine learning techniques for anticipating hypertension and highlights the importance of optimization techniques in improving predictive models’ performance.