Classification of Imbalanced Malaria Disease Using Naïve Bayesian Algorithm

Malaria disease is one whose presence is rampant in semi urban and non-urban areas especially resource poor developing countries. It is quite evident from the datasets like malaria, dengue, etc., where there is always a possibility of having more negative patients (non-occurrence of the disease) compared to patients suffering from disease (positive cases). Developing a model based decision support system with such unbalanced datasets is a cause of concern and it is indeed necessary to have a model predicting the disease quite accurately. Classification of imbalanced malaria disease data become a crucial task in medical application domain because most of the conventional machine learning algorithms are showing very poor performance to classify whether a patient is affected by malaria disease or not. In imbalanced data, majority (unaffected) class samples are dominates the minority (affected) class samples leading to class imbalance. To overcome the nature of class imbalance problem, balancing the data samples is the best solution which produces the better accuracy in classification of minority samples. The aim of this research is to propose a comparative study on classifying the imbalanced malaria disease data using Naive Bayesian classifier in different environments like weka and using an R-language. We present here, clinical descriptive study on 165 patients of different age group people collected at medical wards of Narasaraopet from 2014-17. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) technique has been used to balance the class distribution and then we performed a comparative study on the dataset using Naïve Bayesian algorithm in various platforms. Out of balanced class distribution data, 70% data was given to train the Naive Bayesian algorithm and the rest of the data was used for testing the model for both weka and R programming environments. Experimental results have indicated that, classification of malaria disease data in weka environment has highest accuracy of 88.5% than the Naive Bayesian algorithm accuracy of 87.5% using R programming language. The impact of vector borne disease is very high in medical applications. Prediction of disease like malaria is an hour of the need and this is possible only with a suitable model for a given dataset. Hence, we have developed a model with Naive Bayesian algorithm is used for current research.