Classification of Heart Disease Using K-Nearest Neighbor and Genetic Algorithm

Data mining techniques have been widely used to mine knowledgeable information from medical data bases. In data mining classification is a supervised learning that can be used to design models describing important data classes, where class attribute is involved in the construction of the classifier. Nearest neighbor (KNN) is very simple, most popular, highly efficient and effective algorithm for pattern recognition. KNN is a straight forward classifier, where samples are classified based on the class of their nearest neighbor. Medical data bases are high volume in nature. If the data set contains redundant and irrelevant attributes, classification may produce less accurate result. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in INDIA. In Andhra Pradesh heart disease was the leading cause of mortality accounting for 32% of all deaths, a rate as high as Canada (35%) and USA. Hence there is a need to define a decision support system that helps clinicians decide to take precautionary steps. In this paper we propose a new algorithm which combines KNN with genetic algorithm for effective classification. Genetic algorithms perform global search in complex large and multimodal landscapes and provide optimal solution. Experimental results shows that our algorithm enhance the accuracy in diagnosis of heart disease. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.