10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology

Authors - Nailah Al-Madi
Abstract - The diagnosis of appendicitis is a challenge especially for children, as its symptoms overlap other diseases and children are unable to express their pain well. The misdiagnosis rate ranges from 28% to 57% in children. Machine learning is efficient in building models that can help predict diseases. XGBoost is one of the best machine learning models since it is based on ensemble learning approach. XGBoost has hyper-parameters that should be tuned well in order to achieve high performance. These parameters could be optimized to find the optimal or near optimal performance of XGBoost. In this paper, an Optimized- XGBoost model is proposed, which uses Genetic Algorithm to optimize seven parameters of XGBoost to achieve high performance. This Optimized-XGBoost is used to predict three class labels of pediatric Appendicitis, including diagnosis (appendicitis or no appendicitis), Severity (complicated or not complicated), and management(conservative or surgical). The experiments were implemented on Pediatric Appendicitis with 38 features and 780 records, and compared optimized-XGBoost with original XGBoost, and other well-known classifiers, such as DT, SVM, NB, KNN, RF, and Adaboost. Results show that optimized-XGBoost achieved highest results for accuracy, precision, recall and F1-Score. For example, the F1 score results for the prediction of severity is 96.15%, for the prediction of diagnosis is 99.36%, and for treatment is 99.36%.