An improved feature selection approach for chronic heart disease detection

Abstract

Irrelevant feature in heart disease dataset affects the performance of binary classification model. Consequently, eliminating irrelevant and redundant feature (s) from training set with feature selection algorithm significantly improves the performance of classification model on heart disease detection. Sequential feature selection (SFS) is successful algorithm to improve the performance of classification model on heart disease detection and reduces the computational time complexity. In this study, sequential feature selection (SFS) algorithm is implemented for improving the classifier performance on heart disease detection by removing irrelevant features and training a model on optimal features. Furthermore, exhaustive and permutation based feature selection algorithm are implemented and compared with SFS algorithm. The implemented and existing feature selection algorithms are evaluated using real world Pima Indian heart disease dataset and result appears to prove that the SFS algorithm outperforms as compared to exhaustive and permutation based feature selection algorithm. Overall, the result looks promising and more effective heart disease detection model is developed with accuracy of 99.3%.