Diabetes is a life-long illness which occurs as a result of lack of insulin hormone or ineffectiveness of insulin hormone. Blood sugar, fructosamine, and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) values are widely used for diagnosis of this disease. Although the role of insulin in diagnosing diabetes is great, the HbA1c value is more accurate. This is because HbA1c value gives information about the past two or three months of blood sugar in the treatment of diabetes. This study aims to estimate the HbA1c value with high accuracy. Follow-up data of diabetic patients were used as data. The Orange data mining software is used because it is easy to use in the modeling phase and contains many methods. In this context, the chapter aims to develop an effective prediction model by using a large number of feature selection and classification methods. The results show that the proposed model successfully predicts the HbA1c parameter. In addition, determination of the parameters that are effective in the diagnosis of diabetes has been carried out with the feature selection methods.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays, diabetes is becoming one of the most serious diseases. Incidence frequency of diabetes which is increasing in the world varies from one community to another based on age, gender, race, dietary habits, genetic characteristics and environmental factors. According to the data obtained from World Health Organization, 108 million diabetics are thought to be in the world in 1980, it is estimated as 422 million in 2014. The global prevalence of diabetes has almost doubled from 4.7% to 8.5% from 1980 to 2014 (World Health Organization, 2016). Unfortunately, every year, about 1.5 million people lose their lives due to diabetes. One of the most important reasons for this increase can be thought as increase in overweight or obese people resulting from malnutrition and sedentary life. According to the data obtained from the same report, 1 out of 3 adults over 18 years old are overweight and 1 out of 10 adults are obese (World Health Organization, 2016).According to the obtained data and the results obtained from the scientific studies, the risk factors of diabetes can be summarized as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 .Risk factors of diabetes
The most important reason of diabetes are the impairments occurred especially in the insulin-secreting cells of pancreas. Insulin is needed for nutrients to be transferred into the cell after the taken by a healthy person, nutrients pass into the blood from the intestines in order to be turned into glucose which is the fuel most needed by the body. If there is no insulin hormone or if the effect of insulin decreases, glucose cannot be transferred into the cell and the amount of sugar in the blood (hyperglycemia) will increase. If this high blood sugar keeps going on constantly, it causes serious damages in our organs (nerve, eye, heart, kidney etc.) over time. As can be seen from Figure 2, excessive and frequent thirst of an individual, increased fluid consumption, excessive urine production, visual impairment, unidentified weight loss, constant tiredness and exhaustion are considered as preliminary indicators of diabetes in energy metabolism (Bilous & Donnelly, 2010).
There are two types of diabetes. These are Type 1, Type 2 and Gestational diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is caused by damage to pancreatic and insulin-producing beta cells at the end of an autoimmune process, or due to unfamiliar disorders. In general, 5-10% of diabetes cases in the community constitute cases of Type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a disease that occurs when the immune system of a healthy individual perceives pancreatic beta cells as foreign as a result of virus, vaccination, medicine, physical or psychic stress and destroy them. When this destruction reaches over 80%, disease symptoms arise. Because Patients with type 1 have insulin deficiency, they must take insulin hormone from outside for life (Durna, 2002).
Type 2 diabetes is generally associated with obesity and physical immobility. At the basis of the disease, genetically predisposed individuals have a lifestyle-related insulin resistance and decreased insulin secretion over time. More than 90% of diabetes cases diagnosed worldwide are type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is controlled using diet, antihyperglycemic drugs and insulin supplementation or combination of them in the first step treatment plan (Durna, 2002).
Gestational diabetes, the third type of diabetes, is expressed by hyperglycemia or increased blood sugar, which is normally higher during pregnancy, but below the diagnostic value of diabetes mellitus. Women with gestational diabetes are at risk of complications during pregnancy and birth. At this point, they and their children are at increased risk of type 2 diabetes in the future.