Coronary artery disease detection using a fuzzy-boosting PSO approach

In the past decades, medical data mining has become a popular data mining subject. Researchers have proposed several tools and various methodologies for developing effective medical expert systems. Diagnosing heart diseases is one of the important topics and many researchers have tried to develop intelligent medical expert systems to help the physicians. In this paper, we propose the use of PSO algorithm with a boosting approach to extract rules for recognizing the presence or absence of coronary artery disease in a patient. The weight of training examples that are classified properly by the new rules is reduced by a boosting mechanism. Therefore, in the next rule generation cycle, the focus is on those fuzzy rules that account for the currently misclassified or uncovered instances. We have used coronary artery disease data sets taken from University of California Irvine, (UCI), to evaluate our new classification approach. Results show that the proposed method can detect the coronary artery disease with an acceptable accuracy. Also, the discovered rules have significant interpretability as well.