Induction of medical expert system rules based on rough sets and resampling methods.

Abstract

Automated knowledge acquisition is an important research issue in improving the efficiency of medical expert systems. Rules for medical expert systems consists of two parts: one is a proposition part, which represent a if-then rule, and the other is probabilistic measures, which represents reliability of that rule. Therefore, acquisition of both knowledge is very important for application of machine learning methods to medical domains. Extending concepts of rough set theory to probabilistic domain, we introduce a new approach to knowledge acquisition, which induces probabilistic rules based on rough set theory (PRIMEROSE) and develop a program that extracts rules for an expert system from clinical database, using this method. The results show that the derived rules almost correspond to those of medical experts.