Abstract
In recent years, the omnipresence of cardiac problems has been recognized as an epidemic. With the correct and quick diagnosis, both mortality and morbidity from cardiac disorders can be dramatically reduced. However, frequent medical check-ups are pricey and out of reach for a large number of people, particularly those living in low-income areas. In this paper, certain time-honored statistical techniques are used to determine the factors that lead to heart disease. Also, the findings were validated using various promising machine learning tools. Feature importance approach was employed to rank the clinical parameters of the patients based on the correlation of heart disease. In the case of statistical investigations, nonparametric tests such as the Mann Whitney U test and the Chi square test, as well as correlation analysis with Pearson correlation and Spearman Correlation were used. For additional validation, seven of the potential feature important based ML algorithms were applied. Moreover, Borda count was implemented to acknowledge the combined observation of those ML models. On top of that, SHAP value was calculated as a feature importance technique and for detailed evaluation. This research reveals two aspects of heart disease diagnosis.We found that eight clinical traits are sufficient to diagnose cardiac disorders, in which three traits are the most important sign of heart disease. One of the discoveries of this investigation uncovered chest pain, number of major blood vessels, thalassemia, age, maximum heart rate, cholesterol, oldpeak, and sex as sufficient clinical signs of individuals for the diagnosis of cardiac disorders. Over the above, considering the findings of all three approaches, chest pain, the number of major blood vessels, and thalassemia were identified as the prime factors of heart disease. The research also found, fasting blood sugar does not have a direct impact on cardiac disease. These findings will have the potency to be incredibly useful in clinical investigations as well as risk assessment for patients. Limiting the most critical features can have a significant impact on the diagnosis of heart disease and reduce the severity of health risks and death of patients.