Computational intelligence for heart disease diagnosis: A medical knowledge driven approach

► This paper investigates the computational intelligence techniques for heart disease diagnosis. ► The best suited algorithms for heart disease diagnosis is identified. ► The potential of Medical feature selection (MFS) is investigated. ► Medical feature selections combined with the computerized feature selection (CFS) are considered. ► This research indicates MFS is promising technique for heart disease diagnostics. This paper investigates a number of computational intelligence techniques in the detection of heart disease. Particularly, comparison of six well known classifiers for the well used Cleveland data is performed. Further, this paper highlights the potential of an expert judgment based (i.e., medical knowledge driven) feature selection process (termed as MFS), and compare against the generally employed computational intelligence based feature selection mechanism. Also, this article recognizes that the publicly available Cleveland data becomes imbalanced when considering binary classification. Performance of classifiers, and also the potential of MFS are investigated considering this imbalanced data issue. The experimental results demonstrate that the use of MFS noticeably improved the performance, especially in terms of accuracy, for most of the classifiers considered and for majority of the datasets (generated by converting the Cleveland dataset for binary classification). MFS combined with the computerized feature selection process (CFS) has also been investigated and showed encouraging results particularly for NaiveBayes, IBK and SMO. In summary, the medical knowledge based feature selection method has shown promise for use in heart disease diagnostics.