Predicting Postnatal Care: How Machine Learning Can Save Lives

Let's talk about postnatal care for a moment. This is the crucial support mothers and their newborns need right after birth and for the next six weeks. It's a critical time when many deaths happen. In some countries, about 40% of women missed out on important postpartum check-ups. So, how can we use technology to predict who will use postnatal care and who won't? Researchers in Ethiopia took on this challenge. They used data from the 2016 Demographic and Health Survey to train machine learning models. They looked at 15 different algorithms and tested them on a group of 7, 193 women. The goal was to find out which models could best predict who would use postnatal care. They found that the MLP Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, and Bagging Classifier were the top performers. These models were great at telling apart who would use postnatal care and who wouldn't. They also discovered that factors like where you live, your education, religion, how rich or poor you are, if you have health insurance, and where you give birth play a big role. This study showed that machine learning can help us forecast who will use postnatal care. It also highlighted that balancing data to deal with different groups is important for accurate predictions. This can guide efforts to improve postnatal care, making sure more mothers and babies get the support they need.