Predictive analytics and data mining in healthcare

Machine Learning and Data Mining for healthcare. There has been an enormous growth in the field of HIT (health information technology) in the recent years. Be it detection of certain diseases, scanning of organs, finding tumors, these machine oriented operations without human intervention, have certainly increased the quality of medical attention one can get, and the technology required has come a long way. Health data tends to be inherently complex with exceptions in almost all cases. Data mining is the technique of converting raw data into a meaningful format. Analysis and prediction on such data, although computationally and algorithmically complex, is an emerging technology that is a small step to more proactive and preventive automated treatment options. There are various data mining techniques such as classification, clustering, association, regression, prediction, pattern recognition etc [1]. Even the efficiency of certain medicines can be found using machine learning techniques, which is a life saving and cost effective method. In this paper, we are going to use machine learning as a tool for predictive analysis to predict chronic kidney diseases based on the Chronic disease dataset taken from UCI ML repository. We will be applying machine learning algorithms, specifically decision trees, to build a classifier to predict if a person has the disease or not. This paper shows the issue that specific machine learning algorithms need to be tailor-made to specific nature of medical data.