A Stacking-Based Model for Non-Invasive Detection of Coronary Heart Disease

Coronary arteriongraphy (CAG) is an accurate invasive technique for the diagnosis of coronary heart disease (CHD). However, its invasive procedure is not appropriate for the detection of CHD in the annual physical examination. With the successful application of machine learning (ML) in various fields, our goal is to perform selective integration of multiple ML algorithms and verify the validity of feature selection methods with personal clinical information commonly seen in the annual physical examination. In this study, a two level stacking based model is designed in which level 1 is base-level and level 2 is meta-level. The predictions of base-level classifiers is selected as the input of meta-level. The pearson correlation coefficient and maximum information coefficient are first calculated to find the classifier with the lowest correlation. Then enumeration algorithm is used to find the best combining classifiers which acquire the best result in the end. The Z-Alizadeh Sani CHD dataset which we use consists of 303 cases verified by CAG. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model obtains an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 95.43%, 95.84%, 94.44%, respectively for the detection of CHD. The proposed method can effectively aid clinicians to detect those with normal coronary arteries from those with CHD.