Enhancing Liver Disease Classification Using Support Vector Machine with IQR-Based Outlier Handling

Abstract

Liver disease is a significant health issue that requires early and accurate diagnosis to prevent serious complications. In this study, we propose an outlier filtering approach using the Interquartile Range (IQR) to enhance the performance of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm in liver disease classification. A publicly available liver dataset consisting of 1,700 patient records with various clinical attributes was used, and the IQR method was applied to detect and remove extreme values before model training. The SVM model employed the Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel to capture nonlinear relationships in the data. The classifier was evaluated under two conditions: without and with IQR-based outlier removal. Performance metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and ROC-AUC were used to assess the model. The experimental results showed that the IQR-based preprocessing improved model performance, with the accuracy increasing from 84.41% to 84.74% and the ROC-AUC score rising from 92.08% to 93.28%. Notably, the recall for the negative class improved from 84.31% to 89.76%, indicating enhanced detection of healthy patients. These findings demonstrate that outlier handling using IQR can contribute to more stable and accurate classification outcomes, especially for models that are sensitive to data irregularities such as SVM.