Abstract:
FACULTY OF TELECOMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION ENGINEERING Department of Software Engineering
Doctor of Philosophy
An Adaptive Classification and Recommendation Model for e-Health
Systems
By Anam Mustaqeem
13F-UET/PhD-SE-06
E-health based system is an advanced topic of research, showing an enormous amount of
effort for providing an efficient response to cardiac diseases. Health monitoring of patients
in particular senior citizens at their home based location is categorized among the wide
ranged applications of today’s health care systems. Health professional track the clinical
condition of elderly patients at remote locations using monitoring devices, which otherwise
would have to admit to a medical caring unit. The purpose of e-health is to highlight the
issues regarding health care and therefore, reduce the chances of hospitalization, help in
improving quality of life style, and saving money. With the advent of e-health, the
information about most critical issues of patients can be accessed from far away locations.
A promising and active research area, which has benefited from the e-health based system
is cardiac monitoring and care.
In this research work, we intend to develop an adaptable and intelligent recommendation
based model for e-health systems. As cardiac diseases are one of most critical and life
threatening disease among chronic diseases, therefore cardiac disease classification and
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recommendation is addressed in this study. The research work has been categorized into
three different areas. The results have been evaluated using standard evaluation metrics
and an improved accuracy is obtained in all research tasks.
A model is proposed using a standard dataset for arrhythmia classification to provide
improved classification accuracy. The approach for classification combines feature
selection, pre-processing and classification techniques, and provides promising diagnosis
results. Further, normalization is done for scaling and standardizing the data parameters.
An improved feature selection method using a wrapper method around the random forest
(RF) is employed to select the most significant features achieving higher classification
accuracies for the UCI arrhythmia dataset. The selected features help in achieving better
accuracy and efficient classification performance.
In the second part of the thesis, the details are presented for collection, analysis and
processing of a customized dataset to implement recommender system for cardiac patients
under the supervision of medical experts. Although recommender systems have emerged
in various domains, development of a clinically apporoved medical recommender systems
still require a long way to go, as medical recommendations directly affect the life of
patients. We have proposed a hybrid machine learning based prediction and risk analysis
based recommendation model for detection of heart disease which provides suitable
medical advice to a patient depending on the type of disease identified. The results show
that the proposed medical recommender system will be a significant contribution in the
field of cardiac disease classification and recommendation.
A medical recommender system is implemented using a modular clustered based
collaborative filtering model, which is an improvisation in the traditional collaborative filtering technique to target the issues of sparsity and scalability. Sub-clustering at two
levels is introduced to ensure fast and robust similarity computations. The involvement of
cardiac experts in the whole process is made possible for clinical approval and disapproval
of the outcomes.