Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world
over the past 10 years. Researchers have been using
several data mining techniques to help health care
professionals in the diagnosis of heart disease. Decision
Tree is one of the successful data mining techniques used.
However, most research has applied J4.8 Decision Tree,
based on Gain Ratio and binary discretization. Gini Index
and Information Gain are two other successful types of
Decision Trees that are less used in the diagnosis of heart
disease. Also other discretization techniques, voting
method, and reduced error pruning are known to produce
more accurate Decision Trees. This research investigates
applying a range of techniques to different types of
Decision Trees seeking better performance in heart
disease diagnosis. A widely used benchmark data set is
used in this research. To evaluate the performance of the
alternative Decision Trees the sensitivity, specificity, and
accuracy are calculated. The research proposes a model
that outperforms J4.8 Decision Tree and Bagging
algorithm in the diagnosis of heart disease patients.