Abstract

Healthcare information systems typically collect, store and manage various kinds of data such as illness details, clinical history, essential body parameters, health insurance plans, and other related data towards enabling data processing and analytics to arrive at better decision making with all the clarity and alacrity. To reduce the mortality rate due to heart diseases, it is essential to predict the presence of disease in its budding stage itself. Manual extraction of the useful knowledge from historical data is practically tedious and time-consuming. Machine learning (ML) algorithms are being used to detect and predict something useful out of both historical and current data. Despite the applicability of machine learning algorithms for prediction, the accuracy of prediction is significantly influenced by features used for prediction. Moreover, to meet the needs of evolving data sizes, suitable technologies for data storage also become essential. Based on these two aspects, a comparative analysis has been performed for feature selection using four filter methods, namely, correlation measure, information gain, gain ratio and relief. Further, a scalable architecture using Hadoop framework has been proposed to enable the machine learning algorithms to handle larger datasets while performing prediction task. The impact of the proposed architecture on the performance of machine learning algorithm has been evaluated with benchmark dataset and found to have improved scalability and accuracy.