Score and Correlation Coefficient-Based Feature Selection for Predicting Heart Failure Diagnosis by Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the most common causes of death that kills approximately 17 million people annually. The main reasons behind CVD are myocardial infarction and the failure of the heart to pump blood normally. Doctors could diagnose heart failure (HF) through electronic medical records on the basis of patient's symptoms and clinical laboratory investigations. However, accurate diagnosis of HF requires medical resources and expert practitioners that are not always available, thus making the diagnosing challengeable. Therefore, predicting the patients' condition by using machine learning algorithms is a necessity to save time and efforts. This paper proposed a machine-learning-based approach that distinguishes the most important correlated features amongst patients' electronic clinical records. The SelectKBest function was applied with chi-squared statistical method to determine the most important features, and then feature engineering method has been applied to create new features correlated strongly in order to train machine learning models and obtain promising results. Optimised hyperparameter classification algorithms SVM, KNN, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression were used to train two different datasets. The first dataset, called Cleveland, consisted of 303 records. The second dataset, which was used for predicting HF, consisted of 299 records. Experimental results showed that the Random Forest algorithm achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores of 95%, 97.62%, 95.35%, and 96.47%, respectively, during the test phase for the second dataset. The same algorithm achieved accuracy scores of 100% for the first dataset and 97.68% for the second dataset, while 100% precision, recall, and F1 scores were reached for both datasets.