An interpretable progressive residual network for automated multiclass diabetes diagnosis

Abstract

Diabetes mellitus remains one of the most widespread and burdensome chronic diseases worldwide, yet invasive assays and high costs constrain early detection. Existing machine-learning studies often reduce diagnosis to a binary task and overlook the clinically important pre-diabetic stage; additionally, many deep models act as uninterpretable “black boxes”. To address these gaps, we propose ProgMDD, an interpretable progressive residual network for multiclass diabetes diagnosis using routine clinical biomarkers. Employing a strict, leakage-free pipeline, LASSO-based feature selection and resampling were applied exclusively to the training set, yielding a compact, robust input panel. After comparing PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP, we selected UMAP for visualization because it optimally balances global and local structure to illustrate progressive class separation. ProgMDD integrates a progressive residual architecture with channel attention and multi-level regularization to enhance feature learning. Rigorously compared against multiple baselines, ProgMDD achieved 97.02% mean accuracy under 5-fold cross-validation, reinforced by a 97.59% accuracy on the purely original, imbalanced hold-out test set and supported by multiple ablation studies. The concordance between LASSO and SHAP rankings supports biological plausibility and model transparency. By uniting interpretable deep learning with low-cost clinical data, ProgMDD furnishes a feasible approach for early screening and risk stratification in primary care, providing a transferable methodological paradigm for other chronic-disease prediction tasks.