Building cost-sensitive decision trees for medical applications

Article type: Other

Authors: Freitas, Alberto

Affiliations: CINTESIS – Center for Research in Health Information Systems and Technologies, Portugal | Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Portugal. E-mail: alberto@med.up.pt

Abstract: This thesis presents strategies for cost-sensitive learning. We have developed an algorithm for decision tree induction that considers various types of costs. The main ones were attribute costs and misclassification costs. Other costs included, for instance, the “risk”, that is a measure of how invasive the test is. We applied our strategy to train and to evaluate cost-sensitive decision trees on medical data. The resulting trees provided a better cost-effective solution for a given problem.

Keywords: Cost-sensitive learning, decision analysis, classification, decision trees, attribute costs, misclassification costs

DOI: 10.3233/AIC-2011-0490

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 285-287, 2011