Predicting Anemia Among Under-Five Children in Nepal Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning
This study addresses the high prevalence of anemia among children under five in Nepal by leveraging the 2022 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey data. To balance model interpretability with the identification of key risk factors, a consensus feature set was constructed through the integration of four feature selection methods: chi-square test, mutual information, point-biserial correlation, and Boruta. The binary classification performance of logistic regression, XGBoost, support vector machines (SVM), deep neural networks (DNN), and TabNet was systematically evaluated on imbalanced data. Results indicate that logistic regression achieved the highest F1-score (0.649) and recall (0.701), SVM attained the best AUC (0.736), and DNN yielded the highest accuracy (0.709), collectively demonstrating the feasibility and potential of machine learning approaches for early screening of childhood anemia.