On the Goodness of Fit of Parametric and Non‑Parametric Data Mining Techniques: The Case of Malaria Incidence Thresholds in Uganda

Abstract

To identify which data mining technique (parametric or non-parametric) best fits the predictions on imbalanced malaria incidence dataset. The researchers compared parametric techniques in form of naïve Bayes and logistic regression against non-parametric techniques in form of support vector machines and artificial neural networks and their goodness of fit and prediction was assessed using 10-fold and 5-fold cross-validation on an independent validation dataset set to determine which model best fits the predictions on imbalanced malaria incidence dataset. The 10-fold cross-validation outperformed the 5-fold cross-validation in all performance metrics with the naïve Bayes classifier attaining accuracy of 69% with a sensitivity of 90.9%, a specificity of 55.6%, a precision of 55.6% and F-measure score of 69.0%, the logistic regression achieved an accuracy of 65.5% with a sensitivity of 83.3%, a specificity of 52.9%, a precision of 55.6% and F-measure score of 66.7%, the support vector machines achieved an accuracy of 82.8% with a sensitivity of 88.2%, a specificity of 75.0%, a precision of 83.3%, and F-measure score of 85.7% whereas the artificial neural networks registered an accuracy of 89.7% with a sensitivity of 94.1%, a specificity of 83.3%, a precision of 88.9%, and F-measure score of 91.4%. Non-parametric data mining techniques in form of artificial neural networks and support vector machines outperformed the parametric data mining technique in form of naïve Bayes in making predictions emanating from imbalanced malaria incidence dataset on account of registering higher F-measure values of 91.4% and 85.7% respectively.