Predicting the Occurrence of Cerebrovascular Accident in Patients using Machine Learning Technique

Cerebrovascular disease commonly known as stroke is the third leading cause of disability and mortality in the world. In recent years, technological advancements have transformed the way information is acquired and how problems are solved in diverse fields of human endeavors, including the medical and healthcare sectors. Machine Learning (ML) and data driven techniques have gain prominence in problem solving and have been deployed in the prediction of the occurrences of stroke. This work explores the application of supervised machine learning algorithms for the prediction of stroke, emphasizing the critical need for early prediction to enhance preventive measures. A comprehensive comparison of classification (Support Vector Machine and Random Forest) and regression (Logistic Regression) algorithms was conducted, with concerns on binary stroke outcome (likelihood of stroke and no stroke) data utilizing dataset from the International Stroke Trial database. The Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and K-fold cross validation were used to balance and address the class imbalance in the datasets. The subsequent model comparison demonstrated distinct strengths and weaknesses among the three models. Random Forest (RF) exhibited high accuracy score of 89%, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR) showed 86% accuracy. LR demonstrated the most balanced predictive performance, achieving high precision for stroke cases and reasonable recall for both classes.