Introduction:

In this homework, you will apply logistic regression to a real-world dataset: the Pima Indians Diabetes Database. This dataset contains medical records from 768 women of Pima Indian heritage, aged 21 or older, and is used to predict the onset of diabetes (binary outcome: 0 = no diabetes, 1 = diabetes) based on physiological measurements.

The data is publicly available from the UCI Machine Learning Repository and can be imported directly.

Dataset URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbrownlee/Datasets/master/pima-indians-diabetes.data.csv

Columns (no header in the CSV, so we need to assign them manually):

  1. Pregnancies: Number of times pregnant
  2. Glucose: Plasma glucose concentration (2-hour test)
  3. BloodPressure: Diastolic blood pressure (mm Hg)
  4. SkinThickness: Triceps skin fold thickness (mm)
  5. Insulin: 2-hour serum insulin (mu U/ml)
  6. BMI: Body mass index (weight in kg/(height in m)^2)
  7. DiabetesPedigreeFunction: Diabetes pedigree function (a function scoring genetic risk)
  8. Age: Age in years
  9. Outcome: Class variable (0 = no diabetes, 1 = diabetes)

Task Overview: You will load the data, build a logistic regression model to predict diabetes onset using a subset of predictors (Glucose, BMI, Age), interpret the model, evaluate it with a confusion matrix and metrics, and analyze the ROC curve and AUC.

Cleaning the dataset Don’t change the following code

library(tidyverse)

url <- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbrownlee/Datasets/master/pima-indians-diabetes.data.csv"

data <- read.csv(url, header = FALSE)

colnames(data) <- c("Pregnancies", "Glucose", "BloodPressure", "SkinThickness", "Insulin", "BMI", "DiabetesPedigreeFunction", "Age", "Outcome")

data$Outcome <- as.factor(data$Outcome)

# Handle missing values (replace 0s with NA because 0 makes no sense here)
data$Glucose[data$Glucose == 0] <- NA
data$BloodPressure[data$BloodPressure == 0] <- NA
data$BMI[data$BMI == 0] <- NA


colSums(is.na(data))
##              Pregnancies                  Glucose            BloodPressure 
##                        0                        5                       35 
##            SkinThickness                  Insulin                      BMI 
##                        0                        0                       11 
## DiabetesPedigreeFunction                      Age                  Outcome 
##                        0                        0                        0

Question 1: Create and Interpret a Logistic Regression Model - Fit a logistic regression model to predict Outcome using Glucose, BMI, and Age.

## Enter your code here

# Fit logistic regression model and summarize
logistic <- glm(Outcome ~ Glucose + BMI + Age, data=data, family="binomial")
summary(logistic)
## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = Outcome ~ Glucose + BMI + Age, family = "binomial", 
##     data = data)
## 
## Coefficients:
##              Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept) -9.032377   0.711037 -12.703  < 2e-16 ***
## Glucose      0.035548   0.003481  10.212  < 2e-16 ***
## BMI          0.089753   0.014377   6.243  4.3e-10 ***
## Age          0.028699   0.007809   3.675 0.000238 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 974.75  on 751  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 724.96  on 748  degrees of freedom
##   (16 observations deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 732.96
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4
#Calculate and interpret R²
rsqr <- 1 - (logistic$deviance / logistic$null.deviance)
rsqr
## [1] 0.25626
#R² = 0.25626, indicating the model explains 25.6% of the variation in the outcome (diabetes diagnosis)

What does the intercept represent (log-odds of diabetes when predictors are zero)?

The intercept represents a log-odds of -9.03 that a person with a glucose of zero, age of zero, and BMI of zero will have diabetes.

For each predictor (Glucose, BMI, Age), does a one-unit increase raise or lower the odds of diabetes? Are they significant (p-value < 0.05)?

A one-unit increase in Glucose, BMI, and Age raises the odds of diabetes. They are significant with p-values well under 0.05.

Question 2: Confusion Matrix and Important Metric

Calculate and report the metrics:

Accuracy: (TP + TN) / Total Sensitivity (Recall): TP / (TP + FN) Specificity: TN / (TN + FP) Precision: TP / (TP + FP)

Use the following starter code

# Keep only rows with no missing values in Glucose, BMI, or Age
data_subset <- data[complete.cases(data[, c("Glucose", "BMI", "Age")]), ]

#Create a numeric version of the outcome (0 = no diabetes, 1 = diabetes).This is required for calculating confusion matrices.
data_subset$Outcome_num <- ifelse(data_subset$Outcome == "1", 1, 0)


# Predicted probabilities
predicted.probs <- logistic$fitted.values


# Predicted classes
predicted.classes <- ifelse(predicted.probs > 0.5, 1, 0)


# Confusion matrix
confusion <- table(
  Predicted = factor(predicted.classes, levels = c(0, 1)),
  Actual = factor(data_subset$Outcome_num, levels = c(0, 1))
)

confusion
##          Actual
## Predicted   0   1
##         0 429 114
##         1  59 150
#Extract Values:
TN <- 429 
FP <- 59
FN <- 114
TP <- 150

#Metrics    
accuracy <- (TP + TN) / (TN + FP + FN + TP)
sensitivity <- TP / (TP + FN)
specificity <- TN / (TN + FP)
precision <- TP / (TP + FP)

cat("Accuracy:", round(accuracy, 3), "\nSensitivity:", round(sensitivity, 3), "\nSpecificity:", round(specificity, 3), "\nPrecision:", round(precision, 3))
## Accuracy: 0.77 
## Sensitivity: 0.568 
## Specificity: 0.879 
## Precision: 0.718

Interpret: How well does the model perform? Is it better at detecting diabetes (sensitivity) or non-diabetes (specificity)? Why might this matter for medical diagnosis?

The model performs quite well overall, though there can be improvements in sensitivity to catch diabetes. The model is better at detecting non-diabetes (specificity). This would be useful for ruling out diabetes from a medical diagnosis, but it wouldn’t do too well attempting to diagnose someone with diabetes.

Question 3: ROC Curve, AUC, and Interpretation

#Enter your code here

#Load library
library(pROC)
## Warning: package 'pROC' was built under R version 4.5.2
## Type 'citation("pROC")' for a citation.
## 
## Attaching package: 'pROC'
## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     cov, smooth, var
#ROC curve & AUC on full data
roc_obj <- roc(response = data_subset$Outcome,
               predictor = logistic$fitted.values,
               levels = c("0", "1"),
               direction = "<")

# Print AUC value
auc_val <- auc(roc_obj); auc_val
## Area under the curve: 0.828
# Plot ROC with AUC displayed
plot.roc(roc_obj, print.auc = TRUE, legacy.axes = TRUE,
         xlab = "False Positive Rate (1 - Specificity)",
         ylab = "True Positive Rate (Sensitivity)")

What does AUC indicate (0.5 = random, 1.0 = perfect)?

AUC: 0.828, indicating the model is pretty good at distinguishing between patients with diabetes and patients without diabetes.

For diabetes diagnosis, prioritize sensitivity (catching cases) or specificity (avoiding false positives)? Suggest a threshold and explain.

Sensitivity should be prioritized as false positives are safer than false negatives. If someone is falsely diagnosed, their health will not be at risk; but if they are not diagnosed, their health will be at risk without treatment. A threshold below 0.5 (eg. 0.4) should be used to favor diabetes predictions, even if they are falsely diagnosed more often.