The Role of Ensemble Learning in Advancing Child Fetal Health: A Focus on Voting and Bagging Techniques

The field of healthcare has witnessed significant advancements in leveraging technology for in-depth analysis of fetal health data, offering profound insights into child development. We meticulously gathered an extensive dataset comprising 1500 instances of child fetal health data sourced from New Born and Pediatric Health Centre, Cuttack, Odisha. We proposed a robust analytical pipeline for effectively classifying and predicting fetal health outcomes. The process initiated with meticulous data preprocessing and refinement, ensuring data integrity and quality. We use clustering techniques unveiled inherent patterns and groupings within the dataset, setting the stage for in-depth analysis and feature extraction. Further enriching the analysis, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is deployed to streamline data dimensionality while retaining essential information. For prediction we use ensemble learning techniques. To predict the condition, we used voting ensemble method encompassing Decision Trees (DT), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Naïve Bayes (NB), after predictive models are successfully constructed, showcasing notable accuracies of 92.28%, 83.89% and 82.22%. These results underscore the effectiveness of these models in predicting fetal health outcomes based on the comprehensive dataset. To further refine model performance, a meticulous GridSearchCV approach exhaustively explored optimal parameter values within predefined parameter grids, significantly enhancing predictive capabilities. Additionally, leveraging a bagging method, particularly Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), and Gradient Boosting, further bolstered predictive accuracies. These bagging models demonstrated exceptional achieving accuracy of 94.02%, 93.22% and 92.28%. The systematic approach involving clustering, dimensionality reduction, ensemble learning, and parameter optimization resulted in highly accurate predictive models for fetal health assessment. Our research not only highlights the potential of machine learning in healthcare but also enhanced predictive models, yielding highly accurate outcomes for fetal health classification.