Performance, Transparency and Time. Feature selection to speed up the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease

Accurate and early prediction of a disease allows to plan and improve a patient's quality of future life. During pandemic situations, the medical decision becomes a speed challenge in which physicians have to act fast to diagnose and predict the risk of the severity of the disease, moreover this is also of high priority for neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease. Machine Learning (ML) models with Features Selection (FS) techniques can be applied to help physicians to quickly diagnose a disease. FS optimally subset features that improve a model performance and help reduce the number of needed tests for a patient and hence speeding up the diagnosis. This study shows the result of three Feature Selection (FS) techniques pre-applied to a classifier algorithm, Logistic Regression, on non-invasive test results data. The three FS are Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) as filter based method, Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) as embedded method and Sequential Feature Selection (SFS) as wrapper method. The outcome shows that FS technique can help to build an efficient and effective classifier, hence improving the performance of the classifier while reducing the computation time.