Ensemble-based machine learning for predicting sudden human fall using health data

Abstract

We attempt to predict the accidental fall of human beings due to sudden abnormal changes in their health parameters such as blood pressure, heart rate, and sugar level. In medical terminology, this problem is known as Syncope. The primary motivation is to prevent such falls by predicting abnormal changes in these health parameters that might trigger a sudden fall. We apply various machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression, a decision tree classifier, a random forest classifier, K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), a support vector machine, and a naive Bayes classifier on a relevant dataset and verify our results with the cross-validation method. We observe that the KNN algorithm provides the best accuracy in predicting such a fall. However, the accuracy results of some other algorithms are also very close. Thus, we move one step further and propose an ensemble model, Majority Voting, which aggregates the prediction results of multiple machine learning algorithms and finally indicates the probability of a fall that corresponds to a particular human being. The proposed ensemble algorithm yields 87.42% accuracy, which is greater than the accuracy provided by the KNN algorithm.