Explainable Ensemble-Based Machine Learning Models for Detecting the Presence of Cirrhosis in Hepatitis C Patients

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 25 Jun 2026] Explainable Ensemble-Based Machine Learning Models for Detecting the Presence of Cirrhosis in Hepatitis C Patients Abrar Alotaibi, Lujain Alnajrani, Nawal Alsheikh, Alhatoon Alanazy, Salam Alshammasi, Meshael Almusairii, Shoog Alrassan, Aisha Alansari Hepatitis C is a liver infection caused by a virus, which results in mild to severe inflammation of the liver. Over many years, hepatitis C gradually damages the liver, often leading to permanent scarring, known as cirrhosis. Patients sometimes have moderate or no symptoms of liver illness for decades before developing cirrhosis. Cirrhosis typically worsens to the point of liver failure. Patients with cirrhosis may also experience brain and nerve system damage, as well as gastrointestinal hemorrhage. Treatment for cirrhosis focuses on preventing further progression of the disease. Detecting cirrhosis earlier is therefore crucial for avoiding complications. Machine learning (ML) has been shown to be effective at providing precise and accurate information for use in diagnosing several diseases. Despite this, no studies have so far used ML to detect cirrhosis in patients with hepatitis C. This study obtained a dataset consisting of 28 attributes of 2038 Egyptian patients from the ML Repository of the University of California at Irvine. Four ML algorithms were trained on the dataset to diagnose cirrhosis in hepatitis C patients: a Random Forest, a Gradient Boosting Machine, an Extreme Gradient Boosting, and an Extra Trees model. The Extra Trees model outperformed the other models achieving an accuracy of 96.92%, a recall of 94.00%, a precision of 99.81%, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 96% using only 16 of the 28 features. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2606.26561 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.26561v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26561 Focus to learn more Journal reference: Computation 2023, 11, 104 Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/computation11060104 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Abrar Alotaibi [view email] [v1] Thu, 25 Jun 2026 03:13:37 UTC (3,313 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)