Young Researcher Award 2021 Conferred On APU Lecturer

Lecturer, Mr Mafas Raheem a specialist in the field of Data Science & Business Analytics has been conferred the Young Researcher Award 2021 by UIJIR Academic Research Foundation, India. The presentation ceremony took place virtually on 30 May 2021.



This prestigious recognition was based on Mafas’ research work in the healthcare domain, titled Deep Neural Network to Predict Diabetes: A Data Science Approach, which was published in an Elsevier Scopus Indexed international journal, in March 2021. Scopus indexes content that is rigorously vetted and selected by an independent review board of experts in their fields.

Mafas’ research work gained the limelight among more than 150 research works of different fields submitted to the organising committee of this award.

In this research, he built a predictive model that can help medical or healthcare practitioners to predict type 2 diabetes (T2D). When completed as a system or application, it can also help the general public to check if they could get affected by T2D.

Diabetes is a major public health concern in Malaysia, it is also one of the main underlying health factors that has contributed to the high Covid-19 death toll in the country.

From a technical perspective, Mafas’ research incorporated a distinct data science approach which included complete data preprocessing based on medical perspectives, variable selection using suitable techniques, target class balancing and hyper-parameter tuning of the Deep Neural Network to build the predictive model, which obtained an excellent accuracy score.

Sharing his thoughts, Mafas, who has nearly 15 years of academic and industry experience said, “Teaching requires continuous learning. The research work which I undertake always gives me more knowledge and opportunity to learn new things, thus aiding me to guide and supervise my students.”

Started reading his PhD at APU in the field of Machine Learning/Text Analytics, Mafas foresees Data Science, which already influenced all business domains, will be greatly extended in the field of healthcare, automobile, agriculture and many others.

​Heartiest congratulations to Young Researcher Mafas.