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. 2025 Jan 24;25(1):302.
doi: 10.1186/s12889-025-21334-1.

Predicting home delivery and identifying its determinants among women aged 15-49 years in sub-Saharan African countries using a Demographic and Health Surveys 2016-2023: a machine learning algorithm

Adem Tsegaw Zegeye  1 , Binyam Chaklu Tilahun  2 , Makida Fekadie  2 , Eliyas Addisu  2 , Birhan Wassie  2 , Berihun Alelign  2 , Mequannet Sharew  2 , Nebebe Demis Baykemagn  2 , Abdulaziz Kebede  3 , Tirualem Zeleke Yehuala  2
Affiliations

Predicting home delivery and identifying its determinants among women aged 15-49 years in sub-Saharan African countries using a Demographic and Health Surveys 2016-2023: a machine learning algorithm

Adem Tsegaw Zegeye et al. BMC Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: Birth-related mortality is significantly increased by home births without skilled medical assistance during delivery, presenting a major risk to the public's health. The objective of this study is to predict home delivery and identify the determinants using machine learning algorithm in sub-Saharan African.

Methods: This study used design science approaches. The data set obtained from demographic health survey in sub-Saharan African weighted sample of 299,759 women was included in the stud. Machine learning models such as Random Forest, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbor, Logistic Regression, Extreme Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost, Artificial Neural Network, and Naive Bayes were used. The predictive model was evaluated by area under the curve, accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure.

Results: The final experimentation results indicated that random forest model performed the best to predict home delivery with accuracy (83%) and, ROC curve (89%). The Shapley additive explanation features an importance plot optimized for random forest model to identifying the most predictors of home delivery. Association rules findings showed that inadequate antenatal care visits, marital status married, no education, mobile phone, television, electricity, poor wealth index, infrequent television viewing, and rural residence were predictor of home delivery.

Conclusion: The random forest machine learning model provides greater predictive power for estimating home delivery risk factors. To reduce the prevalence of home delivery, this finding recommends to emphasis on improving antenatal care services, education, and awareness about health facility delivery.

Keywords: Demographic and health survey; Home delivery; Machine learning; Python; Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval and consent to participate: This study was based on secondary data analysis, and we obtained permission from the MEASURE DHS program to download and use the data for our research purposes. As a result, ethical approval and participant consent are not required for this study. The dataset is publicly available in the MEASURE DHS program’s official database, with no personal identifiers. Consent for publication: Not applicable. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

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Fig. 1
Map of study of the area of Sub-Saharan Africa
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Fig. 2
Sample size determination
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Fig. 3
A schematic representation of the sampling procedure of the sub-Saharan African countries
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Fig. 4
Overview of the machine learning framework used for predicting home delivery
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Class distribution before SMOTE
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Class distribution after SMOTE
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Confusion matrices for random forest classifier
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Fig. 8
Model comparison balanced dataset by accuracy and AUC chart
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Fig. 9
ROC curve analysis
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Random forest accuracy chart
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Fig. 11
Mean SHAP values feature important predictors of home delivery
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Fig. 12
Waterfall plot displaying prediction of home delivery
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Fig. 13
Beeswarm (summary) plot by optimized random forest model
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Fig. 14
Association rule mining by using apriori algorithms
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