Chapter 6
Predicting Heart Disease with Multiple
Classifiers
Charly Gnoguem, Jules Degila, and Carlyna Bondiombouy
Abstract Heart disease accounts for several deaths worldwide and is the mainspring
of cardiovascular morbidity. It is increasingly ravaging human lives—about a hun-
dred million in the previous decade. Given that data is generated daily by several
sources and in various formats, its timely, accurate, and cost-efficient prediction is
imperative for clinical reforms. Machine learning is reputable for its effectiveness in
the prediction of medical conditions by use of medical data. The complex correla-
tions present in medical datasets increase the complexity of such predictions. A novel
hybrid technique is proposed to improve the prediction of heart disease in this doc-
ument. This technique focuses on the reduction of false negatives for the betterment
of patient care. The proposed technique assigns weights to four classifiers each built
with one of the four reputable algorithms—decision tree, random forest, K-nearest
neighbor, and logistic regression. The final class of a new instance is that predicted
by the maximum weighted sum of predictions from the classifiers. This technique is
compared with already existing methods, and an improvement in accuracy (92.10%)
and sensitivity (94.59%) and a drastic reduction in false negatives are observed with
the Cleveland dataset.
1 Introduction
Among the leading causes of death worldwide, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa,
is cardiovascular disease (CVD) [1, 2]. It accounts for about 25% of deaths annu-
ally across the world [3]. Heart disease (HD) is a term that describes CVDs related
C. Gnoguem (B ) · J. Degila
Institut de Mathématiques et de Sciences Physiques, University of Abomey-Calavi, BP613
Porto-Novo, Benin
e-mail: charly.gnoguem@imsp-uac.org
J. Degila
e-mail: jules.degila@imsp-uac.org
C. Bondiombouy
Centre d’ Excellence d’Afrique en Science Mathématiques, Porto-Novo, Benin
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
M. Saraswat et al. (eds.), Intelligent Vision in Healthcare, Studies in Autonomic,
Data-driven and Industrial Computing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7771-7_6
59