Selection of medical tests based on linear nonseparability of data sets: a study on evaluation of liver diseases...

A new method of solving the problem of medical tests selection is proposed. This method is based on the notion of linear nonseparability of data. A measure of linear nonseparability is computed by minimization of the perceptron criterion function. A multistage strategy of search of the minimum sufficient tests subset is described. This strategy is reliable in the sense that it allows us to find the least (globally) sufficient number of tests. The considerations are illustrated on a liver diseases data example.