Improving coronary heart disease prediction by outlier elimination

Nowadays, heart disease is the major cause of deaths globally. According to a survey conducted by the World Health Organization, almost 18 million people die of heart diseases (or cardiovascular diseases) every day. So, there should be a system for early detection and prevention of heart disease. Detection of heart disease mostly depends on the huge pathological and clinical data that is quite complex. So, researchers and other medical professionals are showing keen interest in accurate prediction of heart disease. Heart disease is a general term for a large number of medical conditions related to heart and one of them is the coronary heart disease (CHD). Coronary heart disease is caused by the amassing of plaque on the artery walls. In this paper, various machine learning base and ensemble classifiers have been applied on heart disease dataset for efficient prediction of coronary heart disease. Various machine learning classifiers that have been employed include k-nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron, multinomial naïve bayes, logistic regression, decision tree, random forest and support vector machine classifiers. Ensemble classifiers that have been used include majority voting, weighted average, bagging and boosting classifiers. The dataset used in this study is obtained from the Framingham Heart Study which is a long-term, ongoing cardiovascular study of people from the Framingham city in Massachusetts, USA. To evaluate the performance of the classifiers, various evaluation metrics including accuracy, precision, recall and f1 score have been used. According to our results, the best accuracy was achieved by logistic regression, random forest, majority voting, weighted average and bagging classifiers but the highest accuracy among these was achieved using weighted average ensemble classifier.