Efficient prediction of coronary artery disease using machine learning algorithms with feature selection techniques

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a notable surge in the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases (CVD), presenting a significant global public health challenge and a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Among the myriad complications stemming from CVD, heart failure stands out as a critical concern. Addressing heart failure through surgical means poses considerable challenges. The primary objective of this research is to identify pivotal attributes linked to heart failure and employ diverse machine learning methodologies to predict its occurrence, thereby enabling early estimation of mortality rates associated with heart failure. Leveraging a heart failure dataset, we conducted comprehensive model construction using pre-processing techniques such as feature scaling and correlation analysis. The Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) method was instrumental in evaluating feature relevance, leading to the selection of two distinct datasets: the whole dataset and the XGBoost dataset. In conclusion, we employed thirteen machine learning methods to predict the occurrence of death events within these datasets. Fine-tuning hyperparameters significantly enhanced model performance. Notably, our model demonstrated exceptional performance on this dataset, achieving the highest accuracy of 85.23% with Random Forest on the whole dataset and 86.36% with Flexible Discriminant Analysis on the XGBoost dataset.