Predicting Heart Disease using Machine Learning? Don't!

I was recently invited to judge a Data Science competition. The students were given the'heart disease prediction' dataset, perhaps an improvised version of the one available on Kaggle. I had seen this dataset before and often come across various self-proclaimed data science gurus teaching naïve people how to predict heart disease through machine learning. I believe the "Predicting Heart Disease using Machine Learning" is a classic example of how not to apply machine learning to a problem, especially where a lot of domain experience is required. Let me unpack the various problems in applying machine learning to this data set.