Evaluation of machine learning techniques for heart disease prediction using multi-criteria decision making

Abstract

Globally, heart disease is the primary cause of death. Early detection of this disease enables cardiologists to make more accurate judgments regarding the health of their patients. Due to machine learning’s ability to identify patterns in data, its use in the medical industry has increased. Many heart disease prediction models have been developed by various researchers utilizing machine learning techniques (MLTs). The performance of MLTs on heart disease prediction may vary for different accuracy measures. Thus, the choice of the appropriate machine-learning technique for heart disease prediction is a challenging task. This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)-based method to evaluate the MLTs for heart disease prediction considering various performance measures taken into account altogether. The proposed approach uses the concept of a combined compromise solution (CoCoSo)- an MCDM method. For validation of the proposed approach, an experimental study was conducted to evaluate the performance of fifteen machine learning techniques for predicting heart disease over three heart disease datasets considering six performance measures taken into account altogether. Results show that the logistic regression and support vector machine are recommended as the most suitable MLTs for heart disease prediction modeling with respect to six performance measures considered simultaneously.