Application of Fuzzy Evidential Network as Low Birth Weight Prognosis Model

Babies are born under 2,500 g., defined as low birth weight (LBW) babies. They are exposed to the higher risks of mortality, congenital malformations, mental retardation, and other physical and neurological impairments. 15.5 % of births around the world are LBW. Reduction of the rate of LBW births to one-third is one of the aims of United Nations Children’s Fund program. Prognosis of LBW births can play a critical role in the reduction of these cases. Also, it helps clinicians to make timely and efficient clinical decisions to save these babies' life. In this study, a hybrid framework called fuzzy evidential network with a good ability to manage different aspects of uncertainty is a selected as the LBW prognosis model. The accuracy of prognosis and the performance of the fuzzy evidential network in the management of missing values of the clinical database were investigated and compared with well-known prognosis models of LBW. The results showed that the fuzzy evidential network has higher prognosis accuracy (84.8%) than other prognosis models. On the other hand, the fusion of naïve Bayes and the fuzzy evidential network outputs resulted in higher prognosis accuracy (85.2%). In addition, the fuzzy evidential network performance in the management of uncertainty induced by imputation method, was better than other prognosis models of this study. The performance loss of this framework as the results of the missing data increment, is less than other models.