Using Blood Indexes to Predict Overweight Statuses: An Extreme Learning Machine-Based Approach

PLoS One. 2015 Nov 23;10(11):e0143003. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0143003. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The number of the overweight people continues to rise across the world. Studies have shown that being overweight can increase health risks, such as high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, coronary heart disease, and certain forms of cancer. Therefore, identifying the overweight status in people is critical to prevent and decrease health risks. This study explores a new technique that uses blood and biochemical measurements to recognize the overweight condition. A new machine learning technique, an extreme learning machine, was developed to accurately detect the overweight status from a pool of 225 overweight and 251 healthy subjects. The group included 179 males and 297 females. The detection method was rigorously evaluated against the real-life dataset for accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve) criterion. Additionally, the feature selection was investigated to identify correlating factors for the overweight status. The results demonstrate that there are significant differences in blood and biochemical indexes between healthy and overweight people (p-value < 0.01). According to the feature selection, the most important correlated indexes are creatinine, hemoglobin, hematokrit, uric Acid, red blood cells, high density lipoprotein, alanine transaminase, triglyceride, and γ-glutamyl transpeptidase. These are consistent with the results of Spearman test analysis. The proposed method holds promise as a new, accurate method for identifying the overweight status in subjects.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Area Under Curve
  • Case-Control Studies
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning*
  • Male
  • Models, Biological
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Overweight / blood*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Support Vector Machine

Grants and funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (61303113, 61133011, 61373053, 61272018 and 61402337). This work is also supported by the key construction academic subject (medical innovation) of Zhejiang Province (11-CX26), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (R1110261, LQ13G010007, LQ13F020011, LY14F020035), and the young talents project of the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University (qnyc 043), the open project program of Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University under Grant No. 93K172013K01, the Opening Project of Zhejiang Provincial Top Key Discipline of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.