An explainable deep learning model for prediction of early‐stage chronic kidney disease

Abstract Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a major public health concern with rising prevalence and huge costs associated with dialysis and transplantation. Early prediction of CKD can reduce the patient's risk of CKD progression to end‐stage kidney failure. Artificial intelligence offers more intelligent and expert healthcare services in disease diagnosis. In this work, a deep learning model is built using deep neural networks (DNN) with an adaptive moment estimation optimization function to predict early‐stage CKD. The health care applications require interpretability over the predictions of the black‐box model to build conviction towards the model's prediction. Hence, the predictions of the DNN‐CKD model are explained by the local interpretable model‐agnostic explainer (LIME). The diagnostic patient data is trained on five layered DNN with three hidden layers. Over the unseen data, the DNN‐CKD model yields an accuracy of 98.75% and a roc_auc score of 98.86% in detecting CKD risk. The explanation revealed by the LIME algorithm echoes the influence of each feature on the prediction made by the DNN‐CKD model over the given CKD data. With its interpretability and accuracy, the proposed system may effectively help medical experts in the early diagnosis of CKD.