Use of Efficient Machine Learning Techniques in the Identification of Patients with Heart Diseases

Cardiovascular disease has become one of the world's major causes of death. Accurate and timely diagnosis is of crucial importance. We constructed an intelligent diagnostic framework for prediction of heart disease, using the Cleveland Heart disease dataset. We have used three machine learning approaches, Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Random Forest (RF) in combination with different sets of features. We have applied the three techniques to the full set of features, to a set of ten features selected by "Pearson's Correlation"technique and to a set of six features selected by the Relief algorithm. Results were evaluated based on accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and several other indices. The best results were obtained with the combination of the RF classifier and the features selected by Relief achieving an accuracy of 98.36%. This could even further be improved by employing a 5-fold Cross Validation (CV) approach, resulting in an accuracy of 99.337%.