Amir R Razavi | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

An approach for generating fuzzy rules from decision trees.

Identifying high-risk breast cancer patients is vital both for clinicians and for patients. Some variables for identifying these patients such as tumor size are good candidates for fuzzification. In this study, Decision Tree Induction (DTI) has been applied to 3949 female breast cancer patients and crisp If-Then rules has been acquired from the resulting tree. After assigning membership functions for each variable in the crisp rules, they were converted into fuzzy rules and a mathematical model was constructed. One hundred randomly selected cases were examined by this model and compared with crisp rules predictions. The outcomes were examined by the area under the ROC curve (AUC). No significant difference was noticed between these two approaches for prediction of recurrence of breast cancer. By soft discretization of variables according to resulting rules from DTI, a predictive model, which is both more robust to noise and more comprehensible for clinicians, can be built.

Breast Neoplasms↗

PubMed2005

Exploring cancer register data to find risk factors for recurrence of breast cancer--application of Canonical Correlation Analysis.

BACKGROUND: A common approach in exploring register data is to find relationships between outcomes and predictors by using multiple regression analysis (MRA). If there is more than one outcome variable, the analysis must then be repeated, and the results combined in some arbitrary fashion. In contrast, Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) has the ability to analyze multiple outcomes at the same time. One essential outcome after breast cancer treatment is recurrence of the disease. It is important to understand the relationship between different predictors and recurrence, including the time interval until recurrence. This study describes the application of CCA to find important predictors for two different outcomes for breast cancer patients, loco-regional recurrence and occurrence of distant metastasis and to decrease the number of variables in the sets of predictors and outcomes without decreasing the predictive strength of the model. METHODS: Data for 637 malignant breast cancer patients admitted in the south-east region of Sweden were analyzed. By using CCA and looking at the structure coefficients (loadings), relationships between tumor specifications and the two outcomes during different time intervals were analyzed and a correlation model was built. RESULTS: The analysis successfully detected known predictors for breast cancer recurrence during the first two years and distant metastasis 2-4 years after diagnosis. Nottingham Histologic Grading (NHG) was the most important predictor, while age of the patient at the time of diagnosis was not an important predictor. CONCLUSION: In cancer registers with high dimensionality, CCA can be used for identifying the importance of risk factors for breast cancer recurrence. This technique can result in a model ready for further processing by data mining methods through reducing the number of variables to important ones.

Adult↗