A Python Framework for Exhaustive Machine Learning Algorithms and Features Evaluations

Abstract

Machine learning domain has grown quickly the last few years, in particular in the mobile eHealth domain. In the context of the DINAMO project, we aimed to detect hypoglycemia on Type 1 diabetes patients by using their ECG, recorded with a sport-like chest belt. In order to know if the data contain enough information for this classification task, we needed to apply and evaluate machine learning algorithms on several kinds of features. We have built a Python toolbox for this reason. It is built on top of the scikit-learn toolbox and it allows evaluating a defined set of machine learning algorithms on a defined set of features extractors, taking care of applying good machine learning techniques such as cross-validation or parameters grid-search. The resulting framework can be used as a first analysis toolbox to investigate the potential of the data. It can also be used to fine-tune parameters of machine learning algorithms or parameters of features extractors. In this paper we explain the motivation of such a framework, we present its structure and we show a case study presenting negative results that we could quickly spot using our toolbox.