Enhancing Mortality Prediction in Heart Failure Patients: Exploring Preprocessing Methods for Imbalanced Clinical Datasets
Heart failure (HF) is a critical condition in which the accurate prediction
of mortality plays a vital role in guiding patient management decisions.
However, clinical datasets used for mortality prediction in HF often suffer
from an imbalanced distribution of classes, posing significant challenges. In
this paper, we explore preprocessing methods for enhancing one-month mortality
prediction in HF patients. We present a comprehensive preprocessing framework
including scaling, outliers processing and resampling as key techniques. We
also employed an aware encoding approach to effectively handle missing values
in clinical datasets. Our study utilizes a comprehensive dataset from the
Persian Registry Of cardio Vascular disease (PROVE) with a significant class
imbalance. By leveraging appropriate preprocessing techniques and Machine
Learning (ML) algorithms, we aim to improve mortality prediction performance
for HF patients. The results reveal an average enhancement of approximately
3.6% in F1 score and 2.7% in MCC for tree-based models, specifically Random
Forest (RF) and XGBoost (XGB). This demonstrates the efficiency of our
preprocessing approach in effectively handling Imbalanced Clinical Datasets
(ICD). Our findings hold promise in guiding healthcare professionals to make
informed decisions and improve patient outcomes in HF management.