Transforming Heart Disease Prediction with Advanced Machine Learning Techniques

Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Early detection is critical to recover patient outcomes and decrease healthcare costs. In recent years, machine learning (ML) advancements have shown significant potential in enhancing the accuracy of CAD diagnosis. This study investigates the application of ML algorithms to improve the detection of CAD by analyzing patient data, including clinical features, imaging, and biomarker profiles. Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and a hybrid of Bi-LSTM+GRU were trained on large datasets to predict the presence of CAD. Results demonstrated that these ML models outperformed traditional diagnostic methods in sensitivity and specificity, offering a robust tool for clinicians to make more informed decisions. The experimental results show that the hybrid model achieved an accuracy of 97.07%. By integrating advanced data preprocessing techniques and feature selection, this study ensures optimal learning and model performance, setting a benchmark for the application of ML in CAD diagnosis. The integration of ML into CAD detection presents a promising avenue for personalized healthcare and could play a pivotal role in the future of cardiovascular disease management.

This study compares traditional machine learning models and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated rule-based systems for heart disease prediction using the UCI Heart Disease dataset. Several classifiers, including Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, and Random Forest, were evaluated alongside rule-based systems generated using GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 4.6. Model performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. Experimental results show that traditional machine learning models consistently outperform LLM-generated rule-based systems in predictive performance. Random Forest achieved the best overall performance with 90.2% accuracy, a precision of 0.829, perfect recall of 1.0, and an F1-score of 0.906. Naive Bayes followed closely with 88.5% accuracy and an F1-score of 0.881. In contrast, the LLM-generated rule models achieved lower performance, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 reaching 80.3% accuracy (F1-score: 0.833) and GPT-4o obtaining 70.5% accuracy (F1-score: 0.690). Despite the performance gap, the LLM-generated rules provide interpretable IF-THEN diagnostic logic that enhances explainability and transparency in clinical decision-making. These findings highlight the trade-off between predictive performance and interpretability in medical artificial intelligence systems. The complete implementation of all experiments, including machine learning models and LLM-derived rule classifiers, is publicly available in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/FeisalAlaswad/LLM-Rule-ML-Heart-Disease-Prediction .

Cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death globally, necessitating early identification, precise risk classification, and dependable decision-support technologies. The advent of large language models (LLMs) provides new zero-shot and few-shot reasoning capabilities, even though machine learning (ML) algorithms, especially ensemble approaches like Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost, are excellent at modeling complex, non-linear patient data and routinely beat logistic regression. This research predicts cardiovascular disease using a merged dataset of 1,190 patient records, comparing traditional machine learning models (95.78% accuracy, ROC-AUC 0.96) with open-source large language models via OpenRouter APIs. Finally, a hybrid fusion of the ML ensemble and LLM reasoning under Gemini 2.5 Flash achieved the best results (96.62% accuracy, 0.97 AUC), showing that LLMs (78.9 % accuracy) work best when combined with ML models rather than used alone. Results show that ML ensembles achieved the highest performance (95.78% accuracy, ROC-AUC 0.96), while LLMs performed moderately in zero-shot (78.9%) and slightly better in few-shot (72.6%) settings. The proposed hybrid method enhanced the strength in uncertain situations, illustrating that ensemble ML is considered the best structured tabular prediction case, but it can be integrated with hybrid ML-LLM systems to provide a minor increase and open the way to more reliable clinical decision-support tools.