Using Decision Tree for Diagnosing Heart Disease Patients

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world over the past 10 years. Researchers have been using several data mining techniques to help health care professionals in the diagnosis of heart disease. Decision Tree is one of the successful data mining techniques used. However, most research has applied J4.8 Decision Tree, based on Gain Ratio and binary discretization. Gini Index and Information Gain are two other successful types of Decision Trees that are less used in the diagnosis of heart disease. Also other discretization techniques, voting method, and reduced error pruning are known to produce more accurate Decision Trees. This research investigates applying a range of techniques to different types of Decision Trees seeking better performance in heart disease diagnosis. A widely used benchmark data set is used in this research. To evaluate the performance of the alternative Decision Trees the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy are calculated. The research proposes a model that outperforms J4.8 Decision Tree and Bagging algorithm in the diagnosis of heart disease patients.