Prediction of Household Food Security Status using Ensemble Learning Models

Background: This research uses the Ethiopian HICE survey dataset. Predicting food insecurity is critical in presenting the household's situation to the appropriate agencies that take preventative and intervention measures. Objective: This research paper's primary goal is to predict households' food security status using ensemble learning models. Methods: We use five base classifiers and a voting strategy for ensemble classification to enhance the performance of different base classifiers. Backward feature elimination and hard and soft voting-based ensemble learning are used to evaluate household food security. The training set for the basic classifiers is composed of the features that have been selected. Each ML classifier makes its prediction about the class label with the help of an ensemble learning method. For making decisions, hard voting uses a simple majority, whereas soft vote employs a weighted probability. To determine the final prediction. Ethiopian household income, consumption, and expenditure dataset are used to test the proposed ensemble learning approach. The backward feature elimination approach improved the model's performance by removing irrelevant and redundant features. Random forest, gradient boosting, multi-layer perceptron, K-nearest Neighbor, and Extra Tree classifiers were used to predict the family's level of food security. Finally, the authors compare the accuracy of ensemble and base classifiers. Results: The experiment result shows that the RF classifier surpasses the other base and ensemble classifiers and scored 99.98% accuracy. Because a Random forest classifier is an ensemble learning classifier that uses several decision trees, the final prediction is computed based on the majority vote of the several trees. The comparison result of hard and soft voting reveals that soft voting outperforms hard voting before and after feature selection with accuracies of 99.79% and 99.77%, respectively. Conclusion: Based on the result obtained, ensemble learning plays a significant role in predicting household food security status and implementing hard and soft voting. The RF classifier surpasses the other base and ensemble classifiers with an accuracy of 99.98%. From ensemble methods, soft voting surpasses hard voting with an accuracy score of 99.79%.