Abstract
In clinical decision support system(CDSS), unlike rule-based expert method, appropriate data-driven machine learning method can easily provide the information of individual feature(clinical test) for disease classification. However, currently developed methods focus on the improvement of the classification accuracy for diagnosis. With the analysis of feature importance in classification, one may infer the novel clinical test sets which highly differentiate the specific diseases or disease states. In this background, we introduce a novel CDSS that integrate a classifier and feature selection module together. Random forest algorithm is applied for the classifier and the feature importance measure. The system selects the significant clinical tests discriminating the diseases by examining the classification error during backward elimination of the features. The superior performance of random forest algorithm in clinical classification was assessed against artificial neural network and decision tree algorithm by using breast cancer, diabetes and heart disease data in UCI Machine Learning Repository. The test with the same data sets shows that the proposed system can successfully select the significant clinical test set for each disease.
