Prediction of addiction to drugs and alcohol using machine learning: A case study on Bangladeshi population

Abstract

Nowadays addiction to drugs and alcohol has become a significant threat to the youth of the society as Bangladesh’s population. So, being a conscientious member of society, we must go ahead to prevent these young minds from life-threatening addiction. In this paper, we approach a machinelearning-based way to forecast the risk of becoming addicted to drugs using machine-learning algorithms. First, we find some significant factors for addiction by talking to doctors, drug-addicted people, and read relevant articles and write-ups. Then we collect data from both addicted and nonaddicted people. After preprocessing the data set, we apply nine conspicuous machine learning algorithms, namely k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, SVM, naïve bayes, classification, and regression trees, random forest, multilayer perception, adaptive boosting, and gradient boosting machine on our processed data set and measure the performances of each of these classifiers in terms of some prominent performance metrics. Logistic regression is found outperforming all other classifiers in terms of all metrics used by attaining an accuracy approaching 97.91%. On the contrary, CART shows poor results of an accuracy approaching 59.37% after applying principal component analysis.