Explainable AI for Chronic Kidney Disease Prediction in Medical IoT: Integrating GANs and Few-Shot Learning

According to recent global public health studies, chronic kidney disease (CKD) is becoming more and more recognized as a serious health risk as many people are suffering from this disease. Machine learning techniques have demonstrated high efficiency in identifying CKD, but their opaque decision-making processes limit their adoption in clinical settings. To address this, this study employs a generative adversarial network (GAN) to handle missing values in CKD datasets and utilizes few-shot learning techniques, such as prototypical networks and model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), combined with explainable machine learning to predict CKD. Additionally, traditional machine learning models, including support vector machines (SVM), logistic regression (LR), decision trees (DT), random forests (RF), and voting ensemble learning (VEL), are applied for comparison. To unravel the "black box" nature of machine learning predictions, various techniques of explainable AI, such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME), are applied to understand the predictions made by the model, thereby contributing to the decision-making process and identifying significant parameters in the diagnosis of CKD. Model performance is evaluated using predefined metrics, and the results indicate that few-shot learning models integrated with GANs significantly outperform traditional machine learning techniques. Prototypical networks with GANs achieve the highest accuracy of 99.99%, while MAML reaches 99.92%. Furthermore, prototypical networks attain F1-score, recall, precision, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) values of 99.89%, 99.9%, 99.9%, and 100%, respectively, on the raw dataset. As a result, the experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested method, offering a reliable and trustworthy model to classify CKD. This framework supports the objectives of the Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) by enhancing smart medical applications and services, enabling accurate prediction and detection of CKD, and facilitating optimal medical decision making.