A novel deep learning model for early diabetes risk prediction using attention-enhanced deep belief networks with highly imbalanced data

Abstract Diabetes mellitus is a prevalent chronic illness with severe complications that demand timely diagnosis. This study introduces an attention-enhanced Deep Belief Network (DBN) for early diabetes risk prediction, designed to address challenges associated with highly imbalanced datasets. Using a dataset from Sylhet Diabetes Hospital, which includes symptom and demographic information from patients, we applied an ensemble feature selection approach to identify critical predictors. To address the class imbalance, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were used to generate synthetic data, ensuring the model’s robustness in identifying underrepresented cases. Additionally, a hybrid loss function combining cross-entropy and focal loss was implemented to improve classification, especially for hard-to-detect instances. Our results show that the attention-based DBN model, augmented with synthetic data from GANs and optimized with a hybrid loss function, achieves an AUC of 1.00, F1-score of 0.97, precision of 0.98, and recall of 0.95, outperforming several baseline models. This research offers a novel and effective approach for early diabetes detection, demonstrating potential for use as a clinical tool in preventive healthcare settings.