Classification of Heart Failure Using Machine Learning: A Comparative Study

Several machine learning classification algorithms were evaluated using a dataset focused on heart failure. Results obtained from logistic regression, random forest, decision tree, K-nearest neighbors, and multilayer perceptron (MLP) were compared to obtain the best model. The random forest method obtained specificity = 0.93, AUC = 0.97, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) = 0.83. The accuracy was high; therefore, it was considered the best model. On the other hand, K-nearest neighbors and MLP (multi-layer perceptron) showed lower accuracy rates. These results confirm the effectiveness of the random forest method in identifying heart failure cases. This study underlines that the number of features, feature selection and quality, model type, and hyperparameter fit are also critical in these studies, as well as the importance of using machine learning techniques.