Evolutionary Intelligence

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12065-019-00327-1

SPECIAL ISSUE

Hybrid genetic algorithm and a fuzzy logic classifier for heart disease

diagnosis
G. Thippa Reddy1 · M. Praveen Kumar Reddy1 · Kuruva Lakshmanna1 · Dharmendra Singh Rajput1 · Rajesh Kaluri1 ·
Gautam Srivastava2,3 

Received: 11 September 2019 / Revised: 11 November 2019 / Accepted: 15 November 2019

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
For the past two decades, most of the people from developing countries are suffering from heart disease. Diagnosing these
diseases at earlier stages helps patients reduce the risk of death and also in reducing the cost of treatment. The objective of
adaptive genetic algorithm with fuzzy logic (AGAFL) model is to predict heart disease which will help medical practitioners
in diagnosing heart disease at early stages. The model consists of the rough sets based heart disease feature selection module
and the fuzzy rule based classification module. The generated rules from fuzzy classifiers are optimized by applying the adap-
tive genetic algorithm. First, important features which effect heart disease are selected by rough set theory. The second step
predicts the heart disease using the hybrid AGAFL classifier. The experimentation is performed on the publicly available UCI
heart disease datasets. Thorough experimental analysis shows that our approach has outperformed current existing methods.

Keywords  Disease classification · Adaptive genetic algorithm · Rough set theory · Feature reduction · Membership
function

1 Introduction huge amounts of data in the medical field [29]. Extracting

patterns from medical data helps medical practitioners in
The progress made in the field of computer technology, diagnosing patients.
storage of digital data, and technological advancement in A patient’s data is comprised of attributes like demogra-
communication technologies has enabled the generation of phy, test results, images, video clippings, and others [12].
Extraction of desired information from the voluminous data
manually is a herculean task considering size of the data
* Gautam Srivastava and wide dimensionsality of the data [2]. Hence, automated
srivastavag@brandonu.ca analyzing techniques are required for analyzing the data.
G. Thippa Reddy It is handy to use data mining techniques which can auto-
thippareddy.g@vit.ac.in mate the analysis as well as handle the large datasets [1].
M. Praveen Kumar Reddy Data mining [3] helps doctors in diagnosing the patients by
praveenkumarreddy@vit.ac.in extracting useful knowledge from patients’ medical data [6,
Kuruva Lakshmanna 16, 18]. We can use the term Medical data mining for mod-
lakshman.kuruva@vit.ac.in els classifying medical data. It uses data mining methods
Dharmendra Singh Rajput for obtaining accurate information. Medical data mining is
dharmendrasingh@vit.ac.in used to diagnose illness, administer therapy, establish rap-
Rajesh Kaluri port among doctors as well as patients, bettering managing
rajesh.kulari@vit.ac.in of healthcare, and so on [15, 24]. Every day, gigabytes of
1 medical data is generated from several sources including
Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India
image databases like SPECT, MRI, PET, signal databases
2
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Brandon like ECG and EEG [25]. Unlike traditional data mining, data
University, Brandon R7A 6A9, Canada
mining in the medical field is very cumbersome [5, 12, 27].
3
Research Center for Interneural Computing, China Medical
University, Taichung 40402, Taiwan, ROC

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In the past few decades, millions of people across the
globe have succumbed to heart disease due to changes in
lifestyle and food habits. Diagnosing heart disease takes a
lot of time. By using machine learning techniques, medi-
cal practitioners can get valuable inputs about the heart
patients, which will enable them to give proper treatment to
the patients [4]. This motivated us to develop this model to
help doctors in diagnosing heart disease patients.
This paper proposes a novel AGAFL classifier for classify-
ing heart disease datasets. AGAFL has three steps:
1. reduction of features/dimensions utilizing rough sets
2. generating rules from the reduced dataset through the
application of Fuzzy Logic Classifier
3. optimizing generated rules through the application of
Adaptive Genetic Algorithm.
The latter utilizes a fitness function for optimizing the
rules generated through Fuzzy Logic Classifier. The major
contributions of the proposed model are as follows:
• rough set theory to identify most relevant features as
Rough Set theory is an effective tool to deal with vague-
ness and uncertainty information to select the most rel-
evant attributes for a decision system.
• Adaptive Genetic Algorithm to optimize the classifica-
tion rules, to achieve better accuracy, reduce time com-
plexity as justified in results and discussion section.
2 Paper organization
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First in Sect. 2,
we review all related works. Section 3 narrates the necessary
background information. We discuss the proposed classifica-
tion approach in Sect. 4. Experimental results are discussed
in Sect. 5. Finally, Sect. 6 discusses future work followed by
Sect. 7 which summarizes some concluding remarks.
3 Related work
For diagnosing diseases, several diagnostic techniques are
proposed by researchers. Long et al. [17] narrated the car-
diac diagnostic method by minimizing dimensions using
rough sets as well as interval type-2 fuzzy logic system.
Then, a hybrid learning procedure comprising of fuzzy
c-means clustering and tuning of parameters using firefly
algorithm is employed on the dataset.
Santhanam and Ephzibah [22] proposed a hybrid genetic
fuzzy model to predict heart disease. For feature selection
genetic algorithms was employed. The selected features were
used to build a classification model using fuzzy inference.
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Evolutionary Intelligence
Sample data was utilized to create the required fuzzy rules.
The genetic algorithm chose a significant and relevant subset
of rules. The parameters selected were serum cholesterol
(chol), sex, obtained maximum heart rate (thalach), ST
depression induced by exercise relative to rest (oldpeak),
exercise induced angina (exang), thal value as well as the
count of major vessels coloured (ca). Fuzzifying was done
through Gaussian membership function, and de-fuzzifying
by employing centroid method. The model was evaluated
by metrics such as specificity, accuracy, sensitivity, confu-
sion matrix.
Srinivas et al. [26] has predicted cardiac disease based
on rough-fuzzy hybrid classifier. The procedure used is: (1)
generating rules utilizing rough set theory, (2) predicting
using fuzzy classifier. Experiment is carried out on publicly
available Hungarian, Cleveland, as well as Switzerland heart
disease datasets. Seera and Lim [23] analyzed medical data
using a hybrid fuzzy min–max neural network, Random For-
est model, as well as the Classification and Regression Tree.
Yuvraj and Vivekanandan [32] described SVM based
Classifying of Tumour with Factorizing of Symmetry-Non-
Negative Matrix by utilization of Data for Gene Expression.
Genes were chosen through Non-negative Matrix Factoriza-
tion. Symmetry NMF was used for classifying and extraction
of features was done by SVM-NMF. Finally, Support Vector
Machine with weighted kernel width was used for classifica-
tion. In the same way, Vafaie et al. [30] had classified heart
disease datasets based on ECG by genetic-fuzzy system and
ECG signals’ dynamical model. Long et al [17] proposed a
model to diagnose cardiac ailment by an algorithm based on
firefly optimization algorithm.
Few models based on Neural Networks are proposed
by Kharat et al. [14] to classify human brain images based
on magnetic resonance. Their Neural Network technique
included three stages namely dimensionality reduction, fea-
ture extraction and classification. During the early stages,
features correlated with MRI images are extracted with Dis-
crete Wavelet Transformation. In the next stage, MRI param-
eters get reduced using Principles Component Analysis. At
the categorizing stage, a couple of classifying units based
on supervised machine learning are used. Former works on
principle of Feed-Forward Artificial Neural Network; the
latter rely on back propagation neural network. Brain images
of MRIs are classified to be normal or abnormal by utiliza-
tion of these classifying units. Henriques et al. [11] explains
predicting cardiac-failure decompensating events by trend-
analysis of tele-monitoring data.
Doctors as well as researchers have proposed several
methods to predict diabetes in order to reduce the cost of
the tests, time to diagnosis, and also for precise prediction.
A scheme to monitor type 2 diabetes mellitus is explained
by Wang and Kang [10]. The following algorithms are
employed in this paper:
Evolutionary Intelligence
1. Decision Tree (DT) to classify and generate rules. It is
relatively very quick as well as efficient in rules genera-
tion.
2. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to processes nonlinear
problems.
3. A back propagation neural network is widely utilized to
diagnose as well as to predict.
Time Series is used to predict based on three models:
Integrated, Auto Regressive and Moving Average. The
above models are combined to produce the following hybrid
models: Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average and
Autoregressive Moving Average. After pre-processing of
data, selection of feature is carried out utilizing these, ANN
predicts the disease and then generates suggestion on imple-
menting clinical procedures as well as strategies that control
diabetes.
Reddy and Khare [28] introduced an algorithm called
FFBAT-Optimized Rule Based Fuzzy Logic Classifier, for
diabetes classification. In this model, Locality Preserving
Projection is utilized to reduce number of features and dia-
betes classification is carried out employing RBFL classi-
fier. The related attributes are found by the algorithm LPP;
then the RBFL generates fuzzy rules, finally the algorithm
of FFBAT is employed to optimize rules. FFBAT is a hybrid
of BAT and another optimization technique namely Firefly
(FF). FFBAT is also used to classify the publicly available
heart disease datasets from UCI machine learning reposi-
tory [21].
Gandomi et al. [9] have suggested Cuckoo Search com-
bined with Lévy flights. Reddy and Khare [20] have intro-
duced an algorithm, OFBAT-RBFL for classifying cardiac
ailments. In this paper Opposition Based Learning is inte-
grated with the FFBAT to improvise FFBAT.
Kaluri and Reddy [13] created a framework to extract
and recognize the sign gesture language using four stages:
1. Segmentation utilizing Modified Region Growing Algo-
rithm
2. Utilizing median filter to remove noise,
3. Feature extraction
4. Recognition employing Adaptive Genetic Fuzzy Classi-
fier
Game et al. [8] have proposed a model for classifying
health care data. It includes the following steps (1) Map-
reduce framework (2) support vector machine (3) optimized
decision tree classifier. PCA is used for dimensionality
reduction. Next SVM is applied. For optimal rule generation
divergence based grey wolf optimization.
Wang et  al. [31] have proposed various evolutionary
approaches for classification. In the first approach encoding
rule sets with bit string genomes is performed. In the second
approach Genetic Programming (GP) is used for creating deci-
sion trees with arbitrary expressions attached to the nodes. In
the third approach, EDDIE-101, is used for classification.
From our in-depth literature survey, we have found that
existing algorithms performed well on heart disease datasest,
but when features are reduced by optimization algorithms,
the performance of the algorithms with respect to several
measures like accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, has also
reduced dramatically.
4 Algorithm background
Pawlak [19] introduced Rough sets theory (RST). RST is
used for analyzing details which are classified as not clear
or not decided. Primary application of RST is with regard
to attribute reduction. Rough sets theory’s common notion
is listed below: Let I = (U, A ∪ {d}) stand for the scheme
of information, where U denotes universe amongst non-
empty group of limited objects, A denotes state attributes’
group which is limited and non-empty, the decision feature is
shown as d (decision table is also such table’s name), ∀a ∈ A
there exists a task that is equivalent fa ∶ U → Va , here Va
stands for A value’s group. If P ⊆ A , P-in-discernibility
associated being symbolized as IND(P) , being distinct:
� �
IND(P) = ⟨x, y⟩𝜖U ∣ ∀a ∈ P, fa (x) = fa (y) (1)
U’s separation produced by IND(P) being symbolized U/P. If
(x, y) ∈ IND(P) , then x as well as y are indiscernible by a fea-
ture from P. After that P-in-discernibility associations simi-
larity classes being symbolised as [x]p . Let X ⊆ U  , P-power
approximation PX as well as P-upper approximation PX of
set X can be distinct:
{ }
PX = x ∈ U ∣ [x]p ⊈ X (2)
{ }
PX = x ∈ U ∣ [x]p ∩ X ≠ 𝜙 (3)
Let p, Q ⊆ A is equivalence relations over U, positive, nega-
tive as well as regions of boundary may get definition to be:
⋃
POSp (Q) = PX
(4)
X∈U|Q
⋃
NEGp (Q) = U − PX
(5)
X∈U|Q
⋃ ⋃
BNDp (Q) = PX − PX
(6)
X∈U|Q X∈U|Q
The optimistic section of separation U ∣ Q with corre-
sponding to P, POSp (Q) , is group of every object of U may
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 Evolutionary Intelligence

become to be positively categorized for obstructing separa-
tion U ∣ Q utilizing P. Q reliant on p in a level k(0 ≤ k ≤ 1)
symbolized by
POSp (Q)
P ⇒ kQ 𝛾P (Q) ∣ ∣ (7)
U proposed adaptive mutation, the rate of mutation calculation
Here p is a set of attributes conditionally, Q is decision
and ⋎P (Q) is the classification’s quality. If k = 1 , Q is reliant
entirely on P; if 0 < k < 1 , Q is oriented incompletely on P;
as well as if k = 0 the Q is unbiased on P. ∣ . ∣ represent set’s
cardinality. Feature diminutions aim is to eradicate features
which are not necessary. Each reduct’s group is distinct:
{ }
Red(C) = R ⊆ C| ⋎R (D) = ⋎C (D), ∀B ⊂ R, ⋎B (D) ≠ ⋎C (D)
(8)
A set of minimal reductions is defined in Eq. 9 as
{ }
Red(C)min = R ∈ Red ∣ ∀R� ∈ Red, |R| ≤ |R� | (9)
5 AGAFL model
5.1 Genetic algorithm
The genetic algorithm starts with a set of solutions (denoted
by chromosomes) called population. The selected solutions
form new solutions (offspring) based on their fitness value -
the more the value of fitness, the more chances they have to
reproduce. The Basic Genetic Algorithm has been explained
in Algorithm 1.
The adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA​ ) is an improved ver-
sion of the genetic algorithm, in which, adaptive mutations
are employed for achieving desired optimizing results. A
genetic algorithm employs mutations to each parent chromo-
some, where random interchanging of genes occurs. In the
is based on the chromosome’s fitness. The performance of
mutation is based on the rate of mutation. For functioning
of AGA​ , chromosomes are to be generated for the solution
set. Every chromosome gets subjected to many AGA​steps.
5.2 Steps in adaptive genetic algorithm
Genetic algorithm is a popular soft computing method. To
improve canonical GAs, many variations are proposed. One
such technique is AGA​ . It has the following steps. The pro-
cess is explained in Fig. 1.
1. Generation of Chromosomes
2. Calculating Fitness function
3. Crossover
4. Adaptive Mutation
5. Selection
While optimizing the rules that the fuzzy classifier gen-
erates, every rule is considered to be a chromosome. The
chromosome pools are randomly generated as well as every
chromosome gets subjected to AGA​’s many operations.
Based on the fitness value, the Chromosomes gets evalu-
ated and those chromosomes are made available at output.
The vital steps in genetic algorithm are mutation, crossover.

Algorithm 1: Basic Genetic Algorithm

1 Generate population of random type with m chromosomes (solution
that suits solving problem) f (y)
2 Fitness: estimate every chromosome y’s fitness f(y) at the population
3 New population: Iterate steps as follows until it arrives at a new
desired population.
(a) Selection: Chooses as per fitness a couple of chromosomes of parent
from a population
(b) Crossover: Parents do crossover according to a probability of crossover
for figuring an offspring that is new. In case there is an absence of
performing of crossover, the offspring can be parent’s exact copy.
(c) Mutation: With a mutation probability, mutate new offsprings at each
locus (position in the chromosome).
(d) Accepting: Insert a new offspring in a new population
4 Employ newly generated population for an additional run of
algorithm.
5 If the terminating condition is satisfied, end the process and return
the best solution from current population
6 Go to step 2

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Evolutionary Intelligence
Fig. 1  Flowchart of AGA​
The chromosome represents contained information in a pre-
defined way of the solution. The binary string is a common
way to encode information about chromosome. A chromo-
some can be representing as follows:
Chromosome 1 ⇒ 𝟷𝟷𝟶𝟷𝟷𝟶𝟶𝟷𝟶𝟶𝟷𝟷𝟶𝟷𝟷𝟶
Chromosome 2 ⇒ 𝟷𝟷𝟶𝟷𝟷𝟷𝟷𝟶𝟶𝟶𝟶𝟷𝟷𝟷𝟷𝟶
Every bit in the string can retain a correspondence to the
solution’s characteristic. In other words a number can be rep-
resented by a complete string. Many coding techniques exist
for solution encoding; it depends basically on the problem
solved. To cite a situation, a real number or an integer could
be directly encoded, certain permutations can be encoded
and so on.
Step 1 Chromosome Generation The initial stage in this
AGA​algorithm is generating chromosomes. The chro-
mosomes here are nothing but the generated rules
employing fuzzy; the genes are nothing but the rule
parameters. At the solution space, a count of ‘C’ chro-
mosomes in random are generated that are given in the
term shown below
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 Evolutionary Intelligence

Chk = [G0 k G1 k ...GCL −1 k ]0 ≤ k ≤ M − 1;0 ≤ i ≤ CL − 1   The selection of mutation rate depends upon the esti-
(10) mated fitness value. Based on the generated rules by
fuzzy logic, the fitness value is utilized in this method.
where Gki is the jth gene of the chromosome, M is the
Comparison of mutation rate with stated values of fit-
total population and CL is the length of the chromosome.
ness is done based on the threshold and resultant values
Step 2 Calculating Fitness function The fitness function
are selected as final mutation rate. The vector represent-
is given in Eq. 11. The prime goal of fitness function
ing the mutation points is as follows:
is to optimize the rules while selecting solutions. The
{ }
solutions for having better fitness are chosen to proceed MUr = mp1 , mp2 ...mpl (14)
further in Eq. 11.
Where l denotes length of chromosome. Rate of muta-
∑
M
tion r identification is done basing on fitness ft .
ft = Rs ∕M (11)
K=1 {
1; if ft ≤ T
MUr = (15)
where s denotes mk to be included in the summation term, 0; else
and certain parameters to improve. Here we have Rs as
the selected rule and M are the rules total count. where T computation is based upon generated fuzzy rule.
  The fitness value, ft for each chromosome is com- Mutating being done for extraction of every mutating
puted based on the chosen rules. Every chromosome is point utilizing in Eq. 14. Rate of mutation changes for
checked against fitness function. Only those solutions every chromosome during every iteration and depends
which satisfy the fitness function will be selected to upon fitness value.
participate in the reproduction using either crossover or Step 5 Selection
mutation.   The last step in the adaptive genetic algorithm is the
Step 3 Crossover For generating a new chromosome, selection process. Based on the fitness value obtained,
crossover is performed between two parent chromo- the chromosomes that are new ( Np ) are positioned in a
somes. The newly generated chromosome is called an selection pool. In selection pool chromosomes whose
offspring. The crossover is carried out depending upon value of fitness is the best will stay on top. The top most
chosen genes and production of offspring depends on Np chromosomes stored in selection pool are chosen as
the crossover rate (CO rate). The equation to find the the next generation between the 2 Np chromosomes.
crossover point is shown in Eq. 12
5.3 Proposed AGAFL method
CG
CPrate = (12)
CL The process of feature reduction decreases the computa-
tion cost and also increases classification performance. To
where CPr ate is the Crossover Rate, CG is the number of
improve results in predicting disease, in this paper, rough
Genes Generated, and CL is length of the chromosome.
sets is used for feature reduction; to generate rule set Fuzzy
  Based on the computed CO rate, the parent chromo-
Logic classifier is used. The solution set is formed by Adap-
somes perform crossover generating a set of new chro-
tive Genetic Algorithm in order to get optimized rules to
mosomes named offspring. By CO, the crossover point
predict disease. The disease prediction model comprises of
is found, and the genes at these points are interchanged
steps: Rough sets based attribute reduction, normalization,
from chromosomes of both parent so that offsprings are
and then AGAFL classification. To start with the input data-
generated containing characteristics of both parents’
set normalization is done in the range of [0, 1] . The rough
chromosomes. The chromosomes generated will have
set based technique is applied for selecting best attributes.
a better fitness when compared with the older chromo-
The reduced attributes will be divided into a couple of sub-
some generation thereby making it better for processing.
sets: testing dataset, training dataset. The training dataset
Step 4 Adaptive Mutation In the proposed method, in
is fed into AGAFL; testing dataset is utilized for testing the
place of mutating step in which some random genes are
proposed model. The process of proposed heart disease pre-
changed from a single parent, the mutation is done based
diction is depicted in Fig. 2. The details of each step in the
on rate of mutation. Mutation rate is calculated as below:
proposed model are described as follows:
Pm
MUr = (13)
CL

where MUr is the Mutation rate, Pm is the Mutation

Point and CL is the length of the chromosome.

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Evolutionary Intelligence

verting data into interval of specific type. For normal-

izing, widely used min-max method is employed. The
original dataset is mapped by Min-max normalization
into one range by using
D − Dmin
Dn = × [newmin − newmax ] + newmin (16)
Dmax − Dmin

Range of transform datasets is described by newmin ,

newmax  ; where, it is utilized that newmin = 0 and
newmax = 1 . The pseudocode of the proposed model is
in Algorithm 2.
2. Attribute Reduction using Rough Sets
  The main task here is reducing attributes utilizing
Rough sets. In addition there is reduction in attributes’
quantity and eliminating details which are irrelevant,
unconnected, noisy or even redundant.
3. Solution Representation
  The solution is represented in a binary system. In
every bit 1 shows selecting as 0, represents not select-
ing attribute of equivalence.
( To cite a situation,
) dataset
containing 10 attributes a1 , a2 , a3 , … a10 as well as a
solution
( Y = 1010110010)  , then chosen attributes will
Fig. 2  The overall process of proposed disease prediction system
be a1 , a3 , a5 , a6 , a9 .

Algorithm 2: Pseudocode of the Proposed Model

Input: Hungarian, Switzerland, and Cleveland Heart Disease
Datasets from UCI Machine Learning Repository.
Output: Optimized Fuzzy Logic Classifier with Optimized
Classification Rules
1 Apply rough set theory for feature extraction from the input datasets.
2 Feed the extracted features to Fuzzy Logic Classifier to train the
model and generate classification rules
(a) Fuzzification: Convert the crisp data into fuzzy data as per equation
(17)
(b) Fuzzy Rule Generation: Generate fuzzy rules from the fuzzy data.
Sample rule is If A1 is high and A2 is low and A3 is medium then class is
C2 class
(c) Defuzzification: Convert the fuzzy rules into crisp rules
3 Apply Adaptive Genetic Algorithm on the model constructed in
Step-2 to optimize the classification rules.
4 Cross validate the model using the testing data. The model is
evaluated by the accuracy, specificity and sensitivity measures.
5 Perform statistical test (name the tests) to validate the results.

1. Normalization 4. Fitness Function

  Consider the dataset containing the number of attrib-   Every solution’s value of fitness’ is generated by fit-
utes and entities. Normalization is applied to the dataset ness function. Solution that is best is chosen based on
to reduce the arithmetic complexity of the data by con- the fitness value. It this work, UCI Heart disease data-

13

set 14 attributes. From the attributes, we see that age,
fasting blood sugar, sex, resting blood pressure are the
attribute subset that are the much contributing param-
eters. These attributes’ subset is applied for defining
the criterion for fitness to generate next population.
Now, rule set from Fuzzy logic classifier will form the
population on which fitness function will be applied.
The Fitness Function states that every rule’s anteced-
ent must possess the attribute subset Sf = (age, fasting
blood sugar, sex, resting blood pressure) to have bet-
ter fitness, will be selected to proceed further. In other
words, the chosen rule to participate in reproduction to
generate
{ next generation } shall be the super set of Sf  . Let
R = r1 , r2 , r3 , … .rm be the set of rules under consid-
eration to generate new population. Let Rf ⊆ Rwhere Rf
is the set of rules containing super sets of Sf  . Goodness
of every solution is evaluated by fitness function Sf .
5. Termination Criteria
  The algorithm will stop its implementation only if
maximum count of iterations is reached. The solution
that contains the best fitness value is selected by utiliz-
ing RS, and the AGAFL is used to classify the datasets.
As mentioned earlier the best attributes are given as
input to fuzzy classifier.
6. Prediction Based on Fuzzy Logic System
  Once the reduction in the features from the dataset
input is done, hybrid ADAFL classifier predicts disease.
Fuzzy logic classifier has three steps:
(a) Fuzzification.
(b) Fuzzy inference engine.
(c) De-Fuzzification
6.1 Fuzzy Inference System
  A fuzzy inference system aids in mapping the
inputs to the equivalent output by predefined fuzzy
rules. The knowledge support includes if-then rules
that denote the relationship among the input and out-
put fuzzy groups. The inference system is enhanced
by a sequence of actions like;
i. Development of fuzzy rules.
ii. Fuzzify values of input based on degree
of membership.
iii. Merging of fuzzified input as well as
fuzzy rules to improve rules’ strength.
iv. Finally the output is de-fuzzified to yield
output as a crisp value.
6.2 Membership function
  The input data is transformed into a value of
membership (or membership degree) among 0 and
1 by the membership function (MF). The triangular
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Evolutionary Intelligence
membership method is selected for modifying the
data of input into fuzzy value. The principle engaged
to analyze the membership values is illustrated
below:
⎧0 if x ≤= i
⎪ x−i
⎪ j−i if i ≤ x ≤ j
f (x) = ⎨ k−x (17)
⎪ k−j if j ≤ x ≤ k
⎪0 if x ≥ k
⎩
6.3 Fuzzy rule generation
  The fuzzy rule generation is a very important mis-
sion that assists in recording the input to its equiva-
lent output. If A1 , A2 , … , AN are the attributes and
C1 , C2 are the class labels then a fuzzy rule can be
framed based on the linguistic values like high,
medium, low. The values N and M are the number
of attributes and number of classes respectively.
Therefore the fuzzy rule can be framed as follows:
• If A1 is high and A2 is low and A3 is medium then
class is C2;
• If A1 is low and A2 is medium and A3 is medium
then class is C1;
• If A1 is high and A2 is medium and A3 is low then
class is C2;
6.4 Rule based fuzzy score computation
  The testing data with reduced attribute is fed to
the AGAFL, where the test data is converted to the
fuzzified value based on the fuzzy membership func-
tion. Then, the fuzzified input is matched with the
fuzzy rules defined in the rule base. Here, the rule
inference procedure is used to obtain the linguistic
value that is then converted to the fuzzy score using
the average weighted method. From the fuzzy score
obtained, the classification decision is produced.
The proposed model is demonstrated in Fig. 2.
6 Results and discussion
To implement the method proposed, Matlab version (7.12) is
utilized. It is being carried out using a laptop with windows
10 that has the processor of Intel Core i5 having a
speed of 1.6 GHz and 8 GB RAM. The model is evaluated on
three different datasets in UCI machine learning repository.
6.1 Dataset description
The experiments were carried out on three different heart
disease datasets from UCI machine learning repository
Evolutionary Intelligence

namely Switzerland, Hungarian and Cleveland. These data-

sets have the following attributes

• sex
• age
• type of chest pain
• cholesterol
• blood pressure while resting
• fasting blood sugar
• maximum attained heart rate
• ECG at rest
• exercise induced angina
• slope of peak exercise
• older peak
• no. of major vessels by fluoroscopy colored
• class label
• thal

6.2 Evaluation metrics Fig. 3  Performance measure based on sensitivity

Evaluating method of heart diease diagnosis is done by using

the metrics below:
TP
Sensitivity =
TP + FN
(Number of true positive assessment)/(Number of all
positive assessment)
TN
Specificity =
TN + FP
(Number of true negative assessment)/(Number of all
negative assessment)
TN + TP
Accuracy =
TN + TP + FN + FP
(Number of correct assessments)/Number of all
assessments).

6.3 Performance evaluation

Heart disease prediction based on novel AGAFL classifica-

tion is applied on the dataset. For classification this model
used hybrid of Adaptive Genetic Algorithm and Fuzzy logic
classifier. In previous works [28], LPP algorithm has been
used for feature reduction and FFBAT+RBFL for predic-
tion, where FFBAT is hybrid of firefly and bat optimiza-
tion algorithms and RBFL is Rule Based Fuzzy Classifier.
Also, Rough Set (RS) algorithm has been used for feature
reduction and Fuzzy Logic Classifier (FL) for prediction,
where FFBAT is hybrid of firefly and bat optimization
algorithms and RBFL is Rule Based Fuzzy Classifier. The
entire dataset is cross validated with k-fold cross validation,
where k = 10, by shuffling the dataset and split the dataset
into k groups (k = 10). Then the first group is used as a
validation dataset whereas remaining k − 1 (9) groups are
used to train the model. It shows the comparative analyzes
of proposed approach based on accuracy sensitivity and
Fig. 4  Performance measure based on specificity
specificity measures. 80% of the data being used for train-
ing the proposed model and remaining 20% to validate the
model. Table 1 proves that the proposed approach outper-
forms the existing approaches. Figures 3, 4 and 5 show the
performance evaluation of proposed and existing algorithms
based on the measures accuracy, sensitivity and specificity
respectively. The proposed method reduces the search space
when the class label of a new record has to be predicted,
hence reducing the time complexity significantly which is
demonstrated in the Fig. 6.

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 Evolutionary Intelligence

algorithm . We performed t test in MATLAB (R2014a)

for significance level 0.05, where statistics are }h�  , }p�
and }t� . If t test return the value h = 0 , null hypothesis is
accepted and if h = 1 , it rejects the null hypothesis implies
that there exist a significance difference between our pro-
posed algorithm and existing one. This could be proven
with the smaller p value than the significance level 0.05
and the larger t (calculated) value than the t (tabulated).
In our experiment we took three datasets: Cleveland,
Hungarian, Switzerland heart disease datasets taken from
UCI machine learning repository. For four degree of free-
dom ( df = observation − 1 ) comparative t test results for
F-Measure on three datasets are given in Table 2. We can
observe that Cleveland except all datasets are significantly
performing better for Proposed AGAFL than other algo-
rithms. Also for Cleveland dataset, all evaluation measures
are showing better results.
Fig. 5  Time efficiency evaluation ANOVA Null Hypothesis is also performed for signifi-
cance testing. ANOVA’s Null hypothesis is true when all
means of the experiment are identical or have no signifi-
cant difference. Thus, they can be considered as a part of a
larger set of the population. On the other hand, the alternate
hypothesis is valid when at least one of the sample means is
different from the rest of the sample means. In mathematical
form, they can be represented as:
Ho ∶ 𝜇1 = 𝜇2 = … ..𝜇n Null hypothesis
H1 ∶ 𝜇1 ≠ 𝜇2 Alternate hypothesis

If the p value is less than the alpha level selected (which

Fig. 6  Performance measure based on accuracy
6.4 Significance testing
it is, in our case), as given in Tables 3 and 4, we reject the
Null Hypothesis.
Within the group variance is larger and between the
groups variance is small. So F will be smaller. Here, we can
see that the F-value is greater than the F-critical value for the
alpha level selected (0.05). Therefore, we have evidence to
reject the null hypothesis and say that at least one of the two
samples have significantly different means and thus belong
to an entirely different population.

To test statistical difference between our proposed algo- 7 Future work

rithm and other existing approaches parametric paired
sample t test is applied [7]. h = 0 is considered as null This work can significantly be improved by using advanced
hypothesis that says that there is no significance differ- meta-heuristic algorithms like whale optimization algo-
ence between one existing algorithm and the proposed rithm, Antlion algorithm, adaptive bee colony algorithm,

Table 1  Performance evaluation Methods Cleveland Hungarian Switzerland

of proposed method and
existing methods Acc Sen Spec Acc Sen Spec Acc Sen Spec

Proposed (AGAFL) 90 91 90 91 92 88 89 97 75
Previous (LPP + RBFL) 68 79 84 67 87 38 72 76 67
Existing (RS + FL) 72.6 100 67 69.7 86 35 63.4 67 72

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Evolutionary Intelligence

Table 2  Statistics of paired t Datasets AGAFL with LPP + RBFL AGAFL with RS + FL

test for F-measure of AGAFL
with LPP + RBFL, AGAFL h p value t (calculated) h p value t (calculated)
with RS + FL for df = 4 and t
(tabulated) = 2.776 Hungarian 1 0.0048 5.4782 1 0.0142 4.989
Cleveland 0 0.1882 1.3834 0 0.1146 1.8502
Switzerland 1 2.81E−07 10.0543 1 0.0026 5.805

Table 3  ANOVA-single factor Group Count Sum Average Variance

summary
Class A 15 80 5.33 3.333
Class B 15 57 3.8 3.533

Table 4  ANOVA Source of variation SS df MS F p value F-critical

Between group 52.1 3 28.4 9.16433 0.0001669 4.335457

Within group 85.7 32 4.33643 – – –
Total 137.8 35 – – – –

and others. Moreover, these models can be extended to References

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and data is not streaming. Thus, we can consider the devel-
opment and testing of the proposed model in the dynamic
environments or use streaming data in this model as a future
work.
8 Conclusion
In this article, a novel method for heart disease classifi-
cation has been proposed using Rough Sets and Fuzzy
rule-based classification with adaptive genetic algorithm.
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