A novel hybrid method based on artificial immune recognition system (AIRS) with fuzzy weighted pre-processing for thyroid disease diagnosis

Proper interpretation of the thyroid gland functional data is an important issue in the diagnosis of thyroid disease. The primary role of the thyroid gland is to help regulation of the body's metabolism. Thyroid hormone produced by the thyroid gland provides this. Production of too little thyroid hormone (hypothyroidism) or production of too much thyroid hormone (hyperthyroidism) defines the type of thyroid disease. Artificial immune systems (AISs) is a new but effective branch of artificial intelligence. Among the systems proposed in this field so far, artificial immune recognition system (AIRS), which was proposed by A. Watkins, has shown an effective and intriguing performance on the problems it was applied. This study aims at diagnosing thyroid disease with a new hybrid machine learning method including this classification system. By hybridizing AIRS with a developed Fuzzy weighted pre-processing, a method is obtained to solve this diagnosis problem via classifying. The robustness of this method with regard to sampling variations is examined using a cross-validation method. We used thyroid disease dataset which is taken from UCI machine learning respiratory. We obtained a classification accuracy of 85%, which is the highest one reached so far. The classification accuracy was obtained via a 10-fold cross-validation. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.