Machine learning-based predictive model for prevention of metabolic syndrome

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a chronic disease caused by obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and dyslipidemia and may lead to cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes. Therefore, the detection and prevention of MetS at an early stage are imperative. Individuals can detect MetS early and manage it effectively if they can easily monitor their health status in their daily lives. In this study, a predictive model for MetS was developed utilizing solely noninvasive information, thereby facilitating its practical application in real-world scenarios. The model's construction deliberately excluded three features requiring blood testing, specifically those for triglycerides, blood sugar, and HDL cholesterol. We used a large-scale Korean health examination dataset (n = 70, 370; the prevalence of MetS = 13.6%) to develop the predictive model. To obtain informative features, we developed three novel synthetic features from four basic information: waist circumference, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and gender. We tested several classification algorithms and confirmed that the decision tree model is the most appropriate for the practical prediction of MetS. The proposed model achieved good performance, with an AUC of 0.889, a recall of 0.855, and a specificity of 0.773. It uses only four base features, which results in simplicity and easy interpretability of the model. In addition, we performed calibrations on the prediction probability and calibrated the model. Therefore, the proposed model can provide MetS diagnosis and risk prediction results. We also proposed a MetS risk map such that individuals could easily determine whether they had metabolic syndrome.