Optimizing brain stroke detection with a weighted voting ensemble machine learning model

Abstract

Abstract Brain stroke is a medical trauma that occurs when there is an impairment or decrease in blood circulation to a particular part of the brain, causing adjacent brain cells to die. Stroke diagnosis after an event is an ineffective method; other more labour-intensive and costly procedures exist for stroke diagnosis. This method involves directing a machine learning algorithm to a marked dataset to identify samples and irregularities indicative of stroke occurrence. This study focused on developing an ensemble machine learning model to predict brain stroke. The model combined the predictions of multiple individualistic classifiers, including random forest, eXtreme gradient boosting, and histogram-based gradient boosting, to improve accuracy. The proposed weighted voting-based ensemble (WVE) classifier model achieved an accuracy of 92.31% on a private stroke prediction dataset. The pre-assessment of stroke risk diagnosis, as suggested in this study, enables many people to take preventive actions well in advance, thereby lowering fatal effects. Our proposed method presents a feasible option for the early or initial diagnosis of stroke, as traditional methods, such as computed tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs), are time-consuming and costly. Future research could explore the use of intelligence-based optimization to enhance classification accuracy and address this limitation.