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This study presents the classification of malaria-prone zones based on (a) meteorological factors, (b) demographics and (c) patient information. Observations are performed on extended features in dataset over the spiking and non-spiking classifiers including Quadratic Integrate and Fire neuron (QIFN) model as a benchmark. As per research studies, parasite transmission is highly dependent on the (i) stagnant water, (ii) population of area and the (iii) greenery of the locality. Considering these factors, three more attributes were added to the existing novel dataset and comparison on the results is presented. For four feature dataset, QIFN exhibited an accuracy of 97.08% in K10 protocol, and with extended dataset; QIFN yields an accuracy of 99.58% in K10 protocol. The benchmarking results showed reliability and stability. There is 12.47% improvement against multilayer perceptron (MLP) and 5.39% against integrate-and-fire neuron (IFN) model. The QIFN model performed the best over the conventional classifiers for deciphering the risk of acquiring malaria in different geographical regions worldwide.

Malaria is an infectious disease caused by parasitic protozoans of the Plasmodium family. These parasites are transmitted by mosquitos which are common in certain parts of the world. Based on their specific climates, these regions have been classified  as low and high risk regions using a backpropagation neural network (BPNN). However, this approach yielded low performance and stability necessitating development of a more robust model. We hypothesized that by spiking neuron models in simulating the characteristics of a neuron, which when embedded with a BPNN, could improve the performance for the assessment of malaria prone regions. To this end, we created an inter-spike interval (ISI)-based BPNN (ISI-BPNN) architecture that uses a single-pass spiking learning strategy and has a parallel structure that is useful for non-linear regression tasks. Existing malaria dataset comprised of 1296 records, that met these attributes, were used. ISI-BPNN showed superior performance, and a high accuracy. The benchmarking results showed reliability and stability and an improvement of 11.9% against a multilayer perceptron and 9.19% against integrate-and-fire neuron models. The ISI-BPNN model is well suited for deciphering the risk of acquiring malaria as well as other diseases in prone regions of the world.