Early Prediction of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Interpretable Machine Learning Algorithms

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases in adults. The progressive nature of Alzheimer’s disease causes widespread damage to the brain, and early diagnosis can manage the disease and slow down its progression effectively.

In this study, a dataset related to the early prediction of Alzheimer’s was used. Spark framework was used for data management and three machine learning algorithms including Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, and Artificial Neural Networks with the best hyperparameters were implemented and compared. To prevent overfitting and measure the efficiency of the models, a 5-fold cross-validation method was utilized. Furthermore, a method was used for interpreting machine learning black box models.

The decision tree and artificial neural network models obtained 98.61% accuracy and 98.60% F1-Score in the Spark framework including one or three computers. Important features in the decision-making process of the artificial neural network were identified using the interpretability technique. In addition, the computational time required for training the proposed models was calculated through different approaches, and the use of multiple computers was 35.95% faster than a single computer.

With increasing the number of Alzheimer’s disease patients around the world, the need for a decision support system using machine learning algorithms, which can predict the disease early in a huge amount of data, is felt more. Therefore, the machine learning models proposed in this study for early prediction of Alzheimer’s disease as an interpretable auxiliary tool in the decision-making process can help clinicians.