Background: Increasing the prevalence of type 2 diabetes has given rise to a global health burden and a concern among health service providers and health administrators. The current study aimed at developing and comparing some statistical models to identify the risk factors associated with type 2 diabetes. In this light, artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machines (SVMs), and multiple logistic regression (MLR) models were applied, using demographic, anthropometric, and biochemical characteristics, on a sample of 9528 individuals from Mashhad City in Iran. Methods: This study has randomly selected 6654 (70%) cases for training and reserved the remaining 2874 (30%) cases for testing. The three methods were compared with the help of ROC curve. Results: The prevalence rate of type 2 diabetes was 14% in our population. The ANN model had 78.7% accuracy, 63.1% sensitivity, and 81.2% specificity. Also, the values of these three parameters were 76.8%, 64.5%, and 78.9%, for SVM and 77.7%, 60.1%, and 80.5% for MLR. The area under the ROC curve was 0.71 for ANN, 0.73 for SVM, and 0.70 for MLR. Conclusion: Our findings showed that ANN performs better than the two models (SVM and MLR) and can be used effectively to identify the associated risk factors of type 2 diabetes.

Keywords: Support vector machine, Data mining, Diabetes type 2

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