A Comparative Study Of Heart Disease Prediction Using Tree-Based Ensemble Classification Techniques

In recent years, the prediction of heart disease has been one of the most complicated tasks in the medical field. Approximately one person dies per minute due to heart disease in the modern era. To help the healthcare industry experts give an early detection in preventing the progression of the disease, Machine Learning offers various algorithms and techniques to achieve this goal. This study compares the performance of tree-based models Random Forest, Decision Tree, Extra Trees, and Gradient Boosting using the Cleveland heart dataset. It investigates whether applying two different ensemble techniques Voting and Stacking, to tree-based models improves heart disease diagnosis performance. The obtained results revealed that the Extra Trees model outweighs the other three models with an accuracy of 92%, whereas the Decision Tree model has the lowest accuracy with 84%. Applying feature selection has enhanced the performance of Random Forest and Gradient Boosting models. As for the ensemble techniques, the Staking ensemble model had the same performance as the Extra trees, with an accuracy of 92%. In contrast, the Voting ensemble model has a lower performance with a 90% accuracy.