A Soft Voting Ensemble Classifier to Improve Survival Rate Predictions of Cardiovascular Heart Failure Patients

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease is one of the deadliest diseases, claiming around 17 million lives worldwide each year. According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than four out of five deaths from cardiovascular disease are caused by heart attacks and strokes, and one-third of these deaths occur prematurely in people under the age of 70. Machine learning approaches can be used to detect the disease. This research aims to improve the prediction model of cardiovascular heart failure patient survival using C4.5, KNN, Logistic Regression algorithms, and the ensemble learning method of Voting Classifier. Based on the testing results, each model showed a significant increase in accuracy in the 70:30 ratio. Logistic Regression and C4.5 achieved the same accuracy, 89.47%, KNN obtained 91.23%, and Voting Classifier experienced a considerable improvement, reaching 94.74%. In testing with ratios of 90:10, 80:20, and 70:30, KNN demonstrated high accuracy but had significant overfitting, with a difference of 7-9% between training and testing accuracy scores in the 90:10 and 80:20 ratios. On the other hand, Voting Classifier showed stable performance in the 70:30 ratio, with an accuracy difference between training and testing scores below 1%. The conclusion of this research is that the Voting Classifier can assist the performance improvement of algorithms for classifying the survival expectancy of cardiovascular heart failure patients into 'Survived' or 'Deceased', compared to Logistic Regression, KNN, and C4.5.