Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2509.02826

Ensemble Learning for Healthcare: A Comparative Analysis of Hybrid Voting and Ensemble Stacking in Obesity Risk Prediction

Towhidul Islam·Md Sumon Ali
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Obesity is a critical global health issue driven by dietary, physiological, and environmental factors, and is strongly associated with chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, and cancer. Machine learning has emerged as a promising approach for early obesity risk prediction, yet a comparative evaluation of ensemble techniques -- particularly hybrid majority voting and ensemble stacking -- remains limited. This study aims to compare hybrid majority voting and ensemble stacking methods for obesity risk prediction, identifying which approach delivers higher accuracy and efficiency. The analysis seeks to highlight the complementary strengths of these ensemble techniques in guiding better predictive model selection for healthcare applications. Two datasets were utilized to evaluate three ensemble models: Majority Hard Voting, Weighted Hard Voting, and Stacking (with a Multi-Layer Perceptron as meta-classifier). A pool of nine Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, evaluated across a total of 50 hyperparameter configurations, was analyzed to identify the top three models to serve as base learners for the ensemble methods. Preprocessing steps involved dataset balancing, and outlier detection, and model performance was evaluated using Accuracy and F1-Score. On Dataset-1, weighted hard voting and stacking achieved nearly identical performance (Accuracy: 0.920304, F1: 0.920070), outperforming majority hard voting. On Dataset-2, stacking demonstrated superior results (Accuracy: 0.989837, F1: 0.989825) compared to majority hard voting (Accuracy: 0.981707, F1: 0.981675) and weighted hard voting, which showed the lowest performance. The findings confirm that ensemble stacking provides stronger predictive capability, particularly for complex data distributions, while hybrid majority voting remains a robust alternative.

Explore related subjects

cs.LGcs.AIstat.APstat.CO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Towhidul Islam, Md Sumon Ali. 2026-05-07. Ensemble Learning for Healthcare: A Comparative Analysis of Hybrid Voting and Ensemble Stacking in Obesity Risk Prediction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02826

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Analysis of Regularized Learning in Banach Spaces for Linear-functional Data

This article delves into the study of the theory of regularized learning in Banach spaces for linear-functional data. It encompasses discussions on representer theorems, pseudo-approximation theorems, and convergence theorems. Regularized learning is designed to minimize regularized empirical risks over a Banach space. The empirical risks are calculated by utilizing training data and multi-loss functions. The input training data are composed of linear functionals in a predual space of the Banach space to capture discrete local information from multimodal data and multiscale models. Through the regularized learning, approximations of the exact solution to an unidentified or uncertain original problem are globally achieved. In the convergence theorems, the convergence of the approximate solutions to the exact solution is established through the utilization of the weak* topology of the Banach space. The theorems of regularized learning are utilized in the interpretation of classical machine learning, such as support vector machines and artificial neural networks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

On Minimal Depth in Neural Networks

Understanding the relationship between the depth of a neural network and its representational capacity is a central problem in deep learning theory. In this work, we develop a geometric framework to analyze the expressivity of ReLU networks with the notion of depth complexity for convex polytopes. The depth of a polytope recursively quantifies the number of alternating convex hull and Minkowski sum operations required to construct it. This geometric perspective serves as a rigorous tool for deriving depth lower bounds and understanding the structural limits of deep neural architectures. We establish lower and upper bounds on the depth of polytopes, as well as tight bounds for classical families. These results yield two main consequences. First, we provide a purely geometric proof of the expressivity bound by Arora et al. (2018), confirming that $\lceil \log_2(n+1)\rceil$ hidden layers suffice to represent any continuous piecewise linear (CPWL) function. Second, we prove that, unlike general ReLU networks, convex polytopes do not admit a universal depth bound. Specifically, the depth of cyclic polytopes in dimensions $n \geq 4$ grows unboundedly with the number of vertices. This result implies that Input Convex Neural Networks (ICNNs) cannot represent all convex CPWL functions with a fixed depth, revealing a sharp separation in expressivity between ICNNs and standard ReLU networks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

ELEMENT: Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum Entropy

Reinforcement learning agents depend on reward signals whose density is rarely under the designer's control, and when such signals are absent, an agent must generate its own drive to explore. State entropy maximization offers a principled objective for this, but existing methods break down at scale in two ways: the intrinsic reward vanishes once a state has been visited, discouraging revisits to the very gateways that lead onward, and estimating entropy over millions of accumulated observations becomes computationally prohibitive. We address both with Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum Entropy (ELEMENT), a multiscale intrinsically motivated framework for reward-free exploration that transfers to downstream tasks. ELEMENT couples lifelong entropy maximization with a complementary episodic term acting on a faster timescale. For the episodic term, we derive average episodic state entropy, an intrinsic reward that is the exact minimizer of a tractable upper bound on the reward-decomposition objective; for the lifelong term, we propose a $k$NN graph-based estimator that keeps entropy tractable without forgetting. ELEMENT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art intrinsic reward baselines on state coverage and unsupervised pre-training. Videos, code, and supplementary material: https://sites.google.com/view/element-rl.

cs.LG↗