• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.20 no.2
• /
• pp.165-172
• /
• 2010

In clinical data minig, choosing the optimal subset of features is such important, not only to reduce the computational complexity but also to improve the usefulness of the model constructed from the given data. Moreover the threshold values (i.e., cut-off points) of selected features are used in a clinical decision criteria of experts for differential diagnosis of diseases. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy discretization approach, which is evaluated by measuring the degree of separation of redundant attribute values in overlapping region, based on spatial distribution of data with continuous attributes. The weighted average of the redundant attribute values is then used to determine the threshold value for each feature and rough set theory is utilized to select a subset of relevant features from the overall features. To verify the validity of the proposed method, we compared experimental results, which applied to classification problem using 668 patients with a chief complaint of dyspnea, based on three discretization methods (i.e., equal-width, equal-frequency, and entropy-based) and proposed discretization method. From the experimental results, we confirm that the discretization methods with fuzzy partition give better results in two evaluation measures, average classification accuracy and G-mean, than those with hard partition.