Heart disease prediction based on external factors: A machine learning approach

Abstract

Technology has immensely changed the world over the last decade. As a consequence, the life of the people is undergoing multiple changes that directly have positive and negative effects on health. Less physical activity and a lot of virtual involvements are pushing people into various health-related issues and heart disease is one of them. Currently, it has gained a great deal of attention among various life-threatening diseases. Heart disease can be detected or diagnosed by different medical tests by considering various internal factors. However, this type of approach is not only time-consuming but also expensive. Concurrently, there are very few studies conducted on heart disease prediction based on external factors. To bridge this gap, we proposed a heart disease prediction model based on the machine learning approach which enables predicting heart disease with 95% accuracy. To acquire the best result, 6 distinct machine learning classifiers (Decision Tree, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Quadratic Discriminant, and Logistic Regression) were used. At the same time, sklearn.ensemble.ExtraTreesClassifier has been used to extract relevant features to improve predictive accuracy and control over-fitting. Findings reveal that Support Vector Machine (SVM) outperforms the others with greater accuracy (95%).