The role of national nutrition programs on stunting reduction in Rwanda using machine learning classifiers: a retrospective study

Abstract Background In Rwanda, the prevalence of childhood stunting has slightly decreased over the past five years, from 38% in 2015 to about 33% in 2020. It is evident whether Rwanda's multi-sectorial approach to reducing child stunting is consistent with the available scientific knowledge. The study was to examine the benefits of national nutrition programs on stunting reduction under two years in Rwanda using machine learning classifiers. Methods Data from the Rwanda DHS 2015–2020, MEIS and LODA household survey were used. By evaluating the best method for predicting the stunting reduction status of children under two years old, the five machine learning algorithms were modelled: Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, K-Near Neighbor, Random Forest, and Decision Tree. The study estimated the hazard ratio for the Cox Proportional Hazard Model and drew the Kaplan–Meier curve to compare the survivor risk of being stunted between program beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. Logistic regression was used to identify the nutrition programs related to stunting reduction. Precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy, and Area under the Curve (AUC) are the metrics that were used to evaluate each classifier's performance to find the best one. Results Based on the provided data, the study revealed that the early childhood development (ECD) program ( p -value = 0.041), nutrition sensitive direct support (NSDS) program ( p -value = 0.03), ubudehe category ( p -value = 0.000), toilet facility ( p -value = 0.000), antenatal care (ANC) 4 visits ( p -value = 0.002), fortified blended food (FBF) program ( p -value = 0.038) and vaccination ( p -value = 0.04) were found to be significant predictors of stunting reduction among under two children in Rwanda. Additionally, beneficiaries of early childhood development ( p < . 0001), nutrition sensitive direct support ( p = 0.0055), antenatal care ( p = 0.0343), Fortified Blended Food ( p = 0.0136) and vaccination ( p = 0.0355) had a lower risk of stunting than non-beneficiaries. Finally, Random Forest performed better than other classifiers, with precision scores of 83.7%, recall scores of 90.7%, F1 scores of 87.1%, accuracy scores of 83.9%, and AUC scores of 82.4%. Conclusion The early childhood development (ECD) program, receiving the nutrition sensitive direct support (NSDS) program, focusing on households with the lowest wealth quintile (ubudehe category), sanitation facilities, visiting health care providers four times, receiving fortified blended food (FBF), and receiving all necessary vaccines are what determine the stunting reduction under two among the 17 districts of Rwanda. Finally, when compared to other models, Random Forest was shown to be the best machine learning (ML) classifier. Random forest is the best classifier for predicting the stunting reduction status of children under two years old.