Cardiovascular diseases are regarded as the most common reason for worldwide deaths. As per World Health Organization, nearly 17.9 million people die of heart-related diseases each year. The high shares of cardiovascular-related diseases in total worldwide deaths motivated researchers to focus on ways to reduce the numbers. In this regard, several works focused on the development of machine learning techniques/algorithms for early detection, diagnosis, and subsequent treatment of cardiovascular-related diseases. These works focused on a variety of issues such as finding important features to effectively predict the occurrence of heart-related diseases to calculate the survival probability. This research contributes to the body of literature by selecting a standard well defined, and well-curated dataset as well as a set of standard benchmark algorithms to independently verify their performance based on a set of different performance evaluation metrics. From our experimental evaluation, it was observed that decision tree is the best performing algorithm in comparison to logistic regression, support vector machines, and artificial neural networks. Decision trees achieved 14% better accuracy than the average performance of the remaining techniques. In contrast to other studies, this research observed that artificial neural networks are not as competitive as the decision tree or support vector machine.
Keywords: artificial neural networks; cardiovascular diseases; decision trees; machine learning; survival prediction.