Evaluation of machine learning algorithms in the early detection of Parkinson's disease: a comparative study

Parkinson's is a neurodegenerative disease that generally affects people over 60 years of age. The disease destroys neurons and increases the accumulation of α-synuclein in many parts of the brain stem, although at present its causes remain unknown. It is therefore a priority to identify a method that can detect the disease, and this is where machine learning models become important. This study aims to perform a comparative analysis of machine learning models focused on the early detection of Parkinson's disease. Logistic regression (LR), support vector machines (SVM), decision trees (DT), extra trees classifiers (ETC), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), random forests (RF), adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) and gradient boosting (GB) algorithms are described and developed to identify the one that offers the best performance. In the training stage, we used the Oxford University dataset for Parkinson's disease detection, which has a total of 23 attributes and 195 records on patient voice recordings. The article is structured into six sections, such as introduction, related work, methodology, results, discussions, and conclusions. The metrics of accuracy, sensitivity, F1 count, and precision were used to measure the models' performance. The results position the KNN model as the best predictor with 95% accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and F1 score.