Feature generation using genetic programming with comparative partner selection for diabetes classification

•Feature selection using various statistical methods for Pima Indian diabetes data.•Feature generation using genetic programming for diabetes classification.•Diabetes classification using genetic programming, KNN and SVM classifier.•Comparative partner selection during crossover in genetic programming.

The ultimate aim of this research is to facilitate the diagnosis of diabetes, a rapidly increasing disease in the world. In this research a genetic programming (GP) based method has been used for diabetes classification. GP has been used to generate new features by making combinations of the existing diabetes features, without prior knowledge of the probability distribution. The proposed method has three stages: features selection is performed at the first stage using t-test, Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, Kullback–Leibler divergence test, F-score selection, and GP. The results of feature selection methods are used to prepare an ordered list of original features where features are arranged in decreasing order of importance. Different subsets of original features are prepared by adding features one by one in each subset using sequential forward selection method according to the ordered list. At the second stage, GP is used to generate new features from each subset of original diabetes features, by making non-linear combinations of the original features. A variation of GP called GP with comparative partner selection (GP-CPS), utilising the strengths and the weaknesses of GP generated features, has been used at the second stage. The performance of GP generated features for classification is tested using the k-nearest neighbor and support vector machine classifiers at the last stage. The results and their comparisons with other methods demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior performance over other recent methods.