Medical Association Rule Mining Using Genetic Network Programming

An efficient algorithm for building a classifier is proposed based on an important association rule mining using genetic network programming (GNP). The proposed method measures the significance of the association via the chi-squared test. Users can define the conditions of important association rules for building a classifier flexibly. The definition can include not only the minimum threshold chi-squared value, but also the number of attributes in the association rules. Therefore, all the extracted important rules can be used for classification directly. GNP is one of the evolutionary optimization techniques, which uses the directed graph structure as genes. Instead of generating a large number of candidate rules, Our method can obtain a sufficient number of important association rules for classification. In addition, our method suits association rule mining from dense databases such as medical datasets, where many frequently occurring items are found in each tuple. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for classification using important association rules extracted by GNP with acquisition mechanisms and present some experimental results of medical datasets. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 91(2): 46-54, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10. 1002/ecj.10022