Improving Extreme Gradient Boosting Model for Heart Disease Prediction Using SMOTE for Class Imbalance

The goal of this study is to come up with an intelligent predictive model that can classify the severity of heart disease. The model will employ both XGBoost and oversampling to resolve the problem of data imbalance. In addition, the model will be implemented for real-world application using an interactive interface. The study uses the UCI Heart Disease dataset, which includes many clinical features. Preprocessing involves handling missing values, removal of features with a substantial fraction of missing values, and the use of SMOTE resampling for learning from class-balanced instances. The main classifier that was used for the research purposes was the XGBoost classifier, while the dataset was split 80:20 for training and testing purposes. For ease of individual-level real-time testing of the predictions, the model is implemented through Streamlit. The XGBoost model worked extraordinarily well, with the accuracy standing at 92%, as did precision along with recall, as well as the F1-score, being 92%. These findings clearly outperform other current studies of the same sort that have made use of alternative classifiers. In addition, its deployment using Streamlit makes it even more clinically applicable. Innovation The novelty of the research lies in the combined application of SMOTE with XGBoost, enabling effective classification under imbalanced conditions, along with the real-time implementation using Streamlit for user-level predictions. The model is of high value for early identification and stratification of the severity of heart disease in clinical decision support settings.