Comparison of gestational diabetes prediction with artificial neural network and decision tree models

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is one of the most common metabolic disorders in pregnancy, which is associated with serious complications. In the event of early diagnosis of this disease, some of the maternal and fetal complications can be prevented. The aim of this study was to early predict gestational diabetes mellitus by two statistical models including artificial neural network (ANN) and decision tree and also comparing these models in the diagnosis of GDM.

In this modeling study, among the cases of pregnant women who were monitored by health care centers of Kermanshah City, Iran, from 2010 to 2012, four hundred cases were selected, therefore the information in these cases was analyzed in this study. Demographic information, mother's maternal pregnancy rating, having diabetes at the beginning of pregnancy, fertility parameters and biochemical test results of mothers was collected from their records. Perceptron ANN and decision tree with CART algorithm models were fitted to the data and those performances were compared. According to the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity criteria and surface under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC), the superior model was introduced.

Following the fitting of an artificial neural network and decision tree models to data set, the following results were obtained. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and area under the ROC curve were calculated for both models. All of these values were more in the neural network model than the decision tree model. The accuracy criterion for these models was 0.83, 0.77, the sensitivity 0.62, 0.56 and specificity 0.95, 0.87, respectively. The surface under the ROC curve in ANN model was significantly higher than decision tree (0.79, 0.74, P=0.03).

In predicting and categorizing the presence and absence of gestational diabetes mellitus, the artificial neural network model had a higher accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and surface under the receiver operating characteristic curve than the decision tree model. It can be concluded that the perceptron artificial neural network model has better predictions and closer to reality than the decision tree model.