Exploring Machine Learning for Predicting Cerebral Stroke: A Study in Discovery

Abstract

Cerebral strokes, the abrupt cessation of blood flow to the brain, lead to a cascade of events, resulting in cellular damage due to oxygen and nutrient deprivation. Contemporary lifestyle factors, including high glucose levels, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, heighten the risk of stroke. This research investigates the application of robust machine learning (ML) algorithms, including logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), and K-nearest neighbor (KNN), to the prediction of cerebral strokes. Stroke data is collected from Harvard Dataverse Repository. The data includes—clinical, physiological, behavioral, demographic, and historical data. The Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), adaptive synthetic sampling (ADASYN), and the Random Oversampling Technique (ROSE) are used to address class imbalances to improve the accuracy of minority classes. To address the challenge of forecasting strokes from partial and imbalanced physiological data, this study introduces a novel hybrid ML approach by combining a machine learning method with an oversampling technique called ADASYN_RF. ADASYN is an oversampling technique used to resample the imbalanced dataset then RF is implemented on the resampled dataset. Also, other oversampling techniques and ML models are implemented to compare the results. Notably, the RF algorithm paired with ADASYN achieves an exceptional performance of 99% detection accuracy, exhibiting its dominance in stroke prediction. The proposed approach enables cost-effective, precise stroke prediction, providing a valuable tool for clinical diagnosis.