Journal
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL SYSTEMS
Volume 36, Issue 1, Pages 233-239Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10916-010-9472-5
Keywords
Fuzzy relation; Bayes; Diagnosis; Medicine; Decision support
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The potential of computer based tools to assist physicians in medical decision making, was envisaged five decades ago. Apart from factors like usability, integration with work-flow and natural language processing, lack of decision accuracy of the tools has hindered their utility. Hence, research to develop accurate algorithms for medical decision support tools, is required. Pioneering research in last two decades, has demonstrated the utility of fuzzy set theory for medical domain. Recently, Wagholikar and Deshpande proposed a fuzzy relation based method (FR) for medical diagnosis. In their case studies for heart and infectious diseases, the FR method was found to be better than naive bayes (NB). However, the datasets in their studies were small and included only categorical symptoms. Hence, more evaluative studies are required for drawing general conclusions. In the present paper, we compare the classification performance of FR with NB, for a variety of medical datasets. Our results indicate that the FR method is useful for classification problems in the medical domain, and that FR is marginally better than NB. However, the performance of FR is significantly better for datasets having high proportion of unknown attribute values. Such datasets occur in problems involving linguistic information, where FR can be particularly useful. Our empirical study will benefit medical researchers in the choice of algorithms for decision support tools.
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