HeartEnsembleNet: An Innovative Hybrid Ensemble Learning Approach for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a prominent determinant of mortality, accounting for 17 million lives lost across the globe each year. This underscores its severity as a critical health issue. Extensive research has been undertaken to refine the forecasting of CVD in patients using various supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning approaches. Methods: This study presents HeartEnsembleNet, a novel hybrid ensemble learning model that integrates multiple machine learning (ML) classifiers for CVD risk assessment. The model is evaluated against six classical ML classifiers, including support vector machine (SVM), gradient boosting (GB), decision tree (DT), logistic regression (LR), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and random forest (RF). Additionally, we compare HeartEnsembleNet with Hybrid Random Forest Linear Models (HRFLM) and ensemble techniques including stacking and voting. Results: Employing a dataset of 70,000 cardiac patients with 12 clinical attributes, our proposed model achieves a notable accuracy of 92.95% and a precision of 93.08%. Conclusions: These results highlight the effectiveness of hybrid ensemble learning in enhancing CVD risk prediction, offering a promising framework for clinical decision support.