Classification Techniques for Cardio-Vascular Diseases Using Supervised Machine Learning

The World Health Organization has estimated that 12 million deaths occur worldwide, every year due to Heart diseases. Half the deaths in the developed countries are due to cardiovascular diseases. The early prognosis of cardiovascular diseases can aid in making decisions on lifestyle changes in high risk patients.

The aim of this paper is to build and compare classification techniques for cardiovascular diseases.

The dataset contained 4270 patients and 14 attributes and it is available on the UCI data repository. The prediction is a binary outcome (event and no event). Variables of each attribute is a potential risk factor. There are both demographic, behavioral and medical risk factors. The classification goal is to predict whether the patient has 10-year risk of future coronary heart disease (CHD).

Different classifiers were tested. The SMOTE technique was used in order to solve the class imbalance. The cross-validation method was used in order to estimate how accurately our predictive models will perform. We evaluate our classifiers by using the following metrics: precision, recall, F1-score, Accuracy, AUC (Area Under Curve).

Based on the resluts, the best scores have the Random Forest and Decision Tree classifiers.