Machine Learning Based Method for Prediction of Heart Disease in Big Data Environment

Abstract

Prediction of diseases is one of the challenging tasks in healthcare domain. Conventionally the heart diseases were diagnosed by experienced medical professional and cardiologist with the help of medical and clinical tests. With conventional method even experienced medical professional struggled to predict the disease with sufficient accuracy. In addition, manually analysing and extracting useful knowledge from the archived disease data becomes time consuming as well as infeasible. The advent of machine learning techniques enables the prediction of various diseases in healthcare domain. Machine learning algorithms are trained to learn from the existing historical data and prediction models are being created to predict the unknown raw data. For the past two decades, machine learning techniques are extensively employed for disease prediction. Despite the capability of machine algorithm on learning from huge historical data which is stored in data mart and data warehouses using traditional database technologies such as Oracle OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP). The conventional database technologies suffer from the limitation that they cannot handle huge data or unstructured data or data that comes with speed. In this context, big data tools and technologies plays a major role in storing and facilitating the processing of huge data. In this paper, an approach is proposed for prediction of heart diseases using Support Vector Algorithm in Spark environment. Support Vector Machine algorithm is basically a binary classifier which classifies both linear and non-linear input data. It transforms the non-linear data into hyper plan with the help of different kernel functions. Spark is a distributed big data processing platform which has a unique feature of keeping and processing a huge data in memory. The proposed approach is tested with a benchmark dataset from UCI repository and results are discussed.