Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Enhanced Heart Disease Prediction: Integrating XGBoost and Capsule Networks with CNN-Transformer Architectures

Abstract

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, emphasizing the need for early and accurate diagnosis. Traditional machine learning (ML) models such as Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been widely used for heart disease classification. However, these models often lack the ability to extract hierarchical patterns and long-range dependencies present in complex medical data. To address this limitation, we propose a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates XGBoost with Capsule Networks (XGBoost-CapsNet) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with Transformer Encoders (CNN-TE) to enhance classification performance.The study utilizes a structured dataset containing essential heart disease indicators. Feature selection is performed using XGBoost, which ranks attributes based on importance. The Capsule Network (CapsNet) is then used to preserve spatial relationships and hierarchical dependencies among features. Meanwhile, the CNN-TE model extracts spatial features through convolutional layers and captures long-range dependencies using a Transformer Encoder with multi-head self-attention mechanisms. The models are trained using optimized hyperparameters and evaluated against baseline ML models (Random Forest, SVM, and standalone CNN). Performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC-ROC are used for comparison.Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed hybrid models significantly outperform traditional approaches. The XGBoost-CapsNet model achieves an accuracy of 98.2%, while CNN-TE reaches 97.4%, both surpassing standalone CNN (95.1%), Random Forest (94.2%), and SVM (91.8%). The AUC-ROC scores further validate the robustness of the models, with XGBoost-CapsNet scoring 0.99 and CNN-TE achieving 0.98. The use of feature selection with XGBoost improves interpretability and computational efficiency, while the hybrid deep learning models enable better feature extraction and classification accuracy.