An efficient artificial neural network-based optimization techniques for the early prediction of coronary heart...

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the world's leading cause of death, contributing to a high mortality rate. This emphasizes the requirement for an advanced decision support system in order to evaluate the risk of CHD. This study presents an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based intelligent healthcare system to predict the risk of CHD. The proposed ANN model is trained using the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) dataset, which comprises 4240 data instances and 15 potential risk factors. To combat overfitting, the proposed model uses four hidden dense layers with dropout rates ranging from 0.5 to 0.2. Also, two activation functions, ReLU and LeakyReLU, are used in conjunction with four optimizers: Adam, SGD, RMSProp, and AdaDelta to fine-tune the parameters and minimize the loss functions. Moreover, three sophisticated preprocessing methods, SMOTE, SMOTETomek, and SMOTEENN, along with the proposed two-stage sampling approach, are applied to address the target class data imbalance. Experimental results demonstrate that the Adam optimizer coupled with the ReLU activation function and the combined sequential effect of SMOTEENN and SMOTETomek's two-stage sampling approach achieved superior performance. The validation accuracy reached 96.25% with a recall value of 0.98, outperforming existing approaches reported in the literature. The combined effect of approaches will be evidence of the modern healthcare decision-making support system for the risk prediction of CHD.