Leakage-Controlled Structure-Preserving Augmentation and Template-Aware Evaluation for Bangla Symptom-Based Disease Prediction

Abstract

Bangla symptom-based disease prediction is commonly evaluated on a small, imbalanced structured benchmark containing many profiles that differ by only one or two symptoms. We test whether train-only asymmetric Bernoulli perturbation improves classification using 725 unique profiles spanning 85 diseases and 172 binary symptoms. Experiments use ten repeated real-profile holdouts and parent-grouped inner cross-validation. The 2 x 2 design separates augmentation from hyperparameter tuning, with exact duplication, random oversampling, class weighting, and SMOTEN as balancing controls. For Bernoulli Naive Bayes (BNB), the gain over tuned raw training does not withstand Holm correction, although BNB attains the highest mean accuracy (97.50%). The boosted-tree models benefit substantially: XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost improve by 18.10, 28.45, and 10.09 percentage points, respectively. A Hamming-distance audit places 91.0% of standard held-out profiles within one symptom bit of the training data. Accuracy decreases on a same-disease 1-bit-purged challenge; nevertheless, XGBoost and LightGBM retain large augmentation gains. We also evaluate robustness to missing and spurious symptoms and the faithfulness of BNB explanations. Overall, Bernoulli perturbation is useful for some model families, but benchmark accuracy should be interpreted together with template proximity.