Optimized Ensemble Learning Approach with Explainable AI for Improved Heart Disease Prediction

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have shown great promise in detecting heart disease. However, to ensure the clinical adoption of ML models, they must not only be generalizable and robust but also transparent and explainable. Therefore, this research introduces an approach that integrates the robustness of ensemble learning algorithms with the precision of Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter tuning and the interpretability offered by Shapley additive explanations (SHAP). The ensemble classifiers considered include adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), random forest, and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). The experimental results on the Cleveland and Framingham datasets demonstrate that the optimized XGBoost model achieved the highest performance, with specificity and sensitivity values of 0.971 and 0.989 on the Cleveland dataset and 0.921 and 0.975 on the Framingham dataset, respectively.