Risk prediction of cardiovascular disease using machine learning classifiers

Abstract Cardiovascular disease (CVD) makes our heart and blood vessels dysfunctional and often leads to death or physical paralysis. Therefore, early and automatic detection of CVD can save many human lives. Multiple investigations have been carried out to achieve this objective, but there is still room for improvement in performance and reliability. This study is yet another step in this direction. In this study, two reliable machine learning techniques, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and K -nearest neighbour (K-NN) have been employed for CVD detection using publicly available University of California Irvine repository data. The performances of the models are optimally increased by removing outliers and attributes having null values. Experimental-based results demonstrate that a higher accuracy in detection of 82.47% and an area-under-the-curve value of 86.41% are obtained using the MLP model, unlike the K-NN model. Therefore, the proposed MLP model was recommended for automatic CVD detection. The proposed methodology can also be employed in detecting other diseases. In addition, the performance of the proposed model can be assessed via other standard data sets.