Symptom-Based Disease Prediction: A Machine Learning Approach

The advent of machine learning techniques has revolutionized various sectors, including healthcare. This project concentrates on leveraging machine learning algorithms for disease prediction based on symptoms. With a dataset comprising 132 symptoms and 41 diseases, the aim is to develop a robust predictive model capable of accurately diagnosing diseases given a set of symptoms. The process involves several key steps. Initially, the dataset is preprocessed to handle missing values, encode categorical variables, and normalize the data. To determine which symptoms are most pertinent to the prognosis of a disease, feature selection techniques are utilized. Various machine learning algorithms, including decision trees, support vector machines, random forests, and XGBoost, were explored to determine the most effective prediction model. XGBoost, in particular, emerges as one of the topperforming models because of its capacity to manage complicated relationships within the data and its effectiveness in handling imbalanced datasets. To evaluate the models' performance, evaluation criteria like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are used. Moreover, to enhance model performance and avo