Sophisticated Ensemble Deep Learning Approaches for Multilabel Retinal Disease Classification in Medical Imaging

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a novel ensemble Deep learning (DL)‐based Multi‐Label Retinal Disease Classification (MLRDC) system, known for its high accuracy and efficiency. Utilising a stacking ensemble approach, and integrating DenseNet201, EfficientNetB4, EfficientNetB3 and EfficientNetV2S models, exceptional performance in retinal disease classification is achieved. The proposed MLRDC model, leveraging DL as the meta‐model, outperforms individual base detectors, with DenseNet201 and EfficientNetV2S achieving an accuracy of 96.5%, precision of 98.6%, recall of 97.1%, and F1 score of 97.8%. Weighted multilabel classifiers in the ensemble exhibit an average accuracy of 90.6%, precision of 98.3%, recall of 91.2%, and F1 score of 94.6%, whereas unweighted models achieve an average accuracy of 90%, precision of 98.6%, recall of 93.1%, and F1 score of 95.7%. Employing Logistic Regression (LR) as the meta‐model, the proposed MLRDC system achieves an accuracy of 93.5%, precision of 98.2%, recall of 93.9%, and F1 score of 96%, with a minimal loss of 0.029. These results highlight the superiority of the proposed model over benchmark state‐of‐the‐art ensembles, emphasising its practical applicability in medical image classification.