Prediction of heart disease and classifiers' sensitivity analysis

BackgroundHeart disease (HD) is one of the most common diseases nowadays, and an early diagnosis of such a disease is a crucial task for many health care providers to prevent their patients for such a disease and to save lives. In this paper, a comparative analysis of different classifiers was performed for the classification of the Heart Disease dataset in order to correctly classify and or predict HD cases with minimal attributes. The set contains 76 attributes including the class attribute, for 1025 patients collected from Cleveland, Hungary, Switzerland, and Long Beach, but in this paper, only a subset of 14 attributes are used, and each attribute has a given set value. The algorithms used K- Nearest Neighbor (K-NN), Naive Bayes, Decision tree J48, JRip, SVM, Adaboost, Stochastic Gradient Decent (SGD) and Decision Table (DT) classifiers to show the performance of the selected classifications algorithms to best classify, and or predict, the HD cases.ResultsIt was shown that using different classification algorithms for the classification of the HD dataset gives very promising results in term of the classification accuracy for the K-NN (K=1), Decision tree J48 and JRip classifiers with accuracy of classification of 99.7073, 98.0488 and 97.2683% respectively. A feature extraction method was performed using Classifier Subset Evaluator on the HD dataset, and results show enhanced performance in term of the classification accuracy for K-NN (N=1) and Decision Table classifiers to 100 and 93.8537% respectively after using the selected features by only applying a combination of up to 4 attributes instead of 13 attributes for the predication of the HD cases.ConclusionDifferent classifiers were used and compared to classify the HD dataset, and we concluded the benefit of having a reliable feature selection method for HD disease prediction with using minimal number of attributes instead of having to consider all available ones.