Knowledge mining from clinical datasets using rough sets and backpropagation neural network

The availability of clinical datasets and knowledge mining methodologies encourages the researchers to pursue research in extracting knowledge from clinical datasets. Different data mining techniques have been used for mining rules, and mathematical models have been developed to assist the clinician in decision making. The objective of this research is to build a classifier that will predict the presence or absence of a disease by learning from the minimal set of attributes that has been extracted from the clinical dataset. In this work rough set indiscernibility relation method with backpropagation neural network (RS-BPNN) is used. This work has two stages. The first stage is handling of missing values to obtain a smooth data set and selection of appropriate attributes from the clinical dataset by indiscernibility relation method. The second stage is classification using backpropagation neural network on the selected reducts of the dataset. The classifier has been tested with hepatitis, Wisconsin breast cancer, and Statlog heart disease datasets obtained from the University of California at Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository. The accuracy obtained from the proposed method is 97.3%, 98.6%, and 90.4% for hepatitis, breast cancer, and heart disease, respectively. The proposed system provides an effective classification model for clinical datasets.