Development of a vaccine-hesitancy prediction instrument: Application of machine learning

Publications

Development of a vaccine-hesitancy prediction instrument: Application of machine learning

Year : 2026

Publisher : Open Science Publishers LLP Inc.

Source Title : Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Science

Document Type :

Abstract

As childhood vaccination is vital for children to prevent them from vaccine preventable diseases, vaccine hesitancy (VH) is a phenomenon that can jeopardize this preventive mechanism. This study aims to develop an instrument to predict VH among parents towards childhood immunization by using machine learning (ML) algorithms. In this study, the approach of predicting VH was to focus on attitude, behavior and practice through the administration of a questionnaire which was verified by statistical analysis and ML algorithms. The researchers developed a 26-item instrument adapted from two other studies. Experts from three different fields reviewed the instrument for content validity. From the pilot study, a 13-item instrument was generated and has a Cronbach alpha value of 0.850 for reliability. The instrument was applied to 510 respondents who are parents attending the Obstetrics and Gynecology and Pediatric Clinics of the state referral hospital, and have children between the ages of 0 and 15 years old. The data collected was subjected to 10 ML algorithms. It was found that in terms of accuracy, the logistic regression with bagging method produced the best results with 99.02% for the hold-out method and 97.45% for the 10-fold cross-validation method. The results of our study show that there is potential of the instrument to anticipate parental VH in the local situation. The instrument’s prospects can be further enhanced if its performance is validated against an objective parameter such as vaccination records.