Ensemble-Stacking Machine Learning Model for Multi-Class Skin Diseases Identification

Algorithm development on skin diseases identification with high cardinality classification is still very challenging. In addition, the high similarity appearance among diseases makes the computer vision approach meet high difficulties on providing clear distinct feature representation. In general, some literature shows that the performance of single machine learning or single deep learning techniques can be further improved when merged by ensemble mechanism. This approach has been applied on binary skin's cancer diseases diagnosis prediction and successfully improve the prediction ability. This paper elaborates the potential of ensemble machine learning approaches using stacking techniques on conducting feature extraction and classification model for identifying more general skin diseases based on dermoscopy images and mobile phone images. The proposed model combines three different CNN architectures, ResNet50, Xception, and VGG16 to extract features from the image then stacked as input for the model trained using five different algorithms, which are logistic regression, support vector machines, multi-layer perceptron, k-nearest neighbors, random forests and the combination of these algorithm in stacking classifier as the base estimators and final estimator. The simulation results present the proposed ensemble - stacking model succeeds to improve the identification ability in all utilized datasets. In addition, the proposed ensemble - stacking models show better recall which indicates good sensitivity on handling false negative. It is beneficial for medical application.