Predictive Data Mining for Medical Diagnosis: An Overview of Heart Disease Prediction

The successful application of data mining in highly visible fields like e-business, marketing and retail has led to its application in other industries and sectors. Among these sectors just discovering is healthcare. The healthcare environment is still "information rich" but "knowledge poor". There is a wealth of data available within the healthcare systems. However, there is a lack of effective analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. This research paper intends to provide a survey of current techniques of knowledge discovery in databases using data mining techniques that are in use in today"s medical research particularly in Heart Disease Prediction. Number of experiment has been conducted to compare the performance of predictive data mining technique on the same dataset and the outcome reveals that Decision Tree outperforms and some time Bayesian classification is having similar accuracy as of decision tree but other predictive methods like KNN, Neural Networks, Classification based on clustering are not performing well. The second conclusion is that the accuracy of the Decision Tree and Bayesian Classification further improves after applying genetic algorithm to reduce the actual data size to get the optimal subset of attribute sufficient for heart disease prediction.