Prediction of Heart Failure by using Machine Learning and Feature Selection

Heart attacks are one of the foremost causes of death in the world. While doctors can carry out multiple tests to diagnose it, it may go undetected for a long time which can prove fatal. However, it is possible to predict the potential risk of a heart attack using Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. This is done using patients' historical data and has found some success in the literature. However, not all features are equally important in such data which may result in low accuracy of prediction. In this study, we use feature selection techniques to select a subset of features with contribution to improve upon the prediction accuracy of ML models. Inforation theory based models are used for feature selection in combination with popular ML classifiers including Random forest (RF), Decision Trees (DTs), Logistic Regression (LR), k-nearest neighbors (kNN), Gradient Boosting, Bagging, Ensemble, Neural Network (NN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). The model is tested the real-world and publicly available Framingham dataset. Results show that the proposed approach improves the prediction of heart disease compared to baseline models.