New cardiovascular disease prediction approach using support vector machine and quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization

Abstract Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Early detection of CVD reduces the risk of a heart attack and increases the chance of recovery. The use of angiography to detect CVD is expensive and has negative side effects. In addition, existing CVD diagnostic methods usually achieve low detection rates and reach the best decision after many iterations with low convergence speeds. Therefore, a novel heart disease detection model based on the quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm and support vector machine (SVM) classification model, namely, QPSO-SVM, was proposed to analyze and predict heart disease risk. First, the data preprocessing was performed by transforming nominal data into numerical data and applying effective scaling techniques. Next, the SVM fitness equation is expressed as an optimization problem and solved using the QPSO to determine the optimal features. Finally, a self-adaptive threshold method for tuning the QPSO-SVM parameters is proposed, which permits it to drop into local minima, and balances between exploration and exploitation in the solution search space. The proposed model is applied to the Cleveland heart disease dataset and compared with state-of-the-art models. The experimental results show that the proposed QPSO-SVM model achieved the best heart-disease-prediction accuracies of 96.31% on the Cleveland heart data set. Furthermore, QPSO-SVM outperforms other state-of-the-art prediction models considered in this research in terms of sensitivity (96.13%), specificity (93.56%), precision (94.23%), and F1 score (0.95%).