A deep learning approach based on convolutional LSTM for detecting diabetes.

• Automation of diabetes detection using Convolutional LSTM. • Diabetes can be detected accurately from clinical data. • Convolutional LSTM based robust model achieved 97.26 % classification accuracy. • Feature selection affects performance of the developed model. Diabetes is a chronic disease that occurs when the pancreas does not generate sufficient insulin or the body cannot effectively utilize the produced insulin. If it remains unidentified and untreated, then it could be very deadliest. One can lead a healthy life with proper treatment if the presence of diabetes can be detected at an early stage. When the conventional process of detecting diabetes is tedious, there is a need of an automated system for identifying diabetes from the clinical and physical data. In this study, we developed a novel diabetes classifying model based on Convolutional Long Short-term Memory (Conv-LSTM) that was not applied yet in this regard. We applied another three popular models such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Traditional LSTM (T-LSTM), and CNN-LSTM and compared the performance with our developed model over the Pima Indians Diabetes Database (PIDD). Significant features were extracted from the dataset using Boruta algorithm that returned glucose, BMI, insulin, blood pressure, and age as important features for classifying diabetes patients more accurately. We performed hyperparameter optimization using Grid Search algorithm in order to find the optimal parameters for the applied models. Initial experiment by splitting the dataset into separate training and testing sets, the Conv-LSTM-based model classified the diabetes patients with the highest accuracy of 91.38 %. In later, using cross-validation technique the Conv-LSTM model achieved the highest accuracy of 97.26 % and outperformed the other three models along with the state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]