Genetic neural network based data mining in prediction of heart disease using risk factors

Data mining techniques have been widely used in clinical decision support systems for prediction and diagnosis of various diseases with good accuracy. These techniques have been very effective in designing clinical support systems because of their ability to discover hidden patterns and relationships in medical data. One of the most important applications of such systems is in diagnosis of heart diseases because it is one of the leading causes of deaths all over the world. Almost all systems that predict heart diseases use clinical dataset having parameters and inputs from complex tests conducted in labs. None of the system predicts heart diseases based on risk factors such as age, family history, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, tobacco smoking, alcohol intake, obesity or physical inactivity, etc. Heart disease patients have lot of these visible risk factors in common which can be used very effectively for diagnosis. System based on such risk factors would not only help medical professionals but it would give patients a warning about the probable presence of heart disease even before he visits a hospital or goes for costly medical checkups. Hence this paper presents a technique for prediction of heart disease using major risk factors. This technique involves two most successful data mining tools, neural networks and genetic algorithms. The hybrid system implemented uses the global optimization advantage of genetic algorithm for initialization of neural network weights. The learning is fast, more stable and accurate as compared to back propagation. The system was implemented in Matlab and predicts the risk of heart disease with an accuracy of 89%.