A hybrid GA and PSO optimized approach for heart-disease prediction based on random forest

Abstract

Nowadays, heart diseases are significantly contributing to deaths all over the world. Thus, heart-disease prediction has garnered considerable attention in the medical domain globally. Accordingly, machine-learning algorithms for the early prediction of heart diseases were developed in several studies to help physicians design medical procedures. In this study, a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) optimized approach based on random forest (RF), called GAPSO-RF, is developed and used to select the optimal features that can increase the accuracy of heart-disease prediction. The proposed GAPSO-RF implements multivariate statistical analysis in the first step to select the most significant features used in the initial population. After that, a discriminate mutation strategy is implemented in GA. GAPSO-RF combines a modified GA for global search and a PSO for local search. Moreover, PSO achieved the concept of rehabbing individuals that had been refused in the selection process. The performance of the proposed GAPSO-RF approach is validated via evaluation metrics, namely, accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve by using two datasets from the University of California, namely, Cleveland and Statlog. The experimental results confirm that the GAPSO-RF approach attained the high heart-disease-prediction accuracies of 95.6% and 91.4% on the Cleveland and Statlog datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed approach outperformed other state-of-the-art prediction methods.