Influence of Optimal Hyperparameters on the Performance of Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Heart Disease

One of the most difficult challenges in medicine is predicting heart disease at an early stage. In this study, six machine learning (ML) algorithms, viz., logistic regression, K-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, decision tree, random forest classifier, and extreme gradient boosting, were used to analyze two heart disease datasets. One dataset was UCI Kaggle Cleveland and the other was the comprehensive UCI Kaggle Cleveland, Hungary, Switzerland, and Long Beach V. The performance results of the machine learning techniques were obtained. The support vector machine with tuned hyperparameters achieved the highest testing accuracy of 87.91% for dataset-I and the extreme gradient boosting classifier with tuned hyperparameters achieved the highest testing accuracy of 99.03% for the comprehensive dataset-II. The novelty of this work was the use of grid search cross-validation to enhance the performance in the form of training and testing. The ideal parameters for predicting heart disease were identified through experimental results. Comparative studies were also carried out with the existing studies focusing on the prediction of heart disease, where the approach used in this work significantly outperformed their results.