Analysis of hepatitis dataset by decision tree based on graph-based induction

Abstract

A machine learning technique called Graph-Based Induction (GBI) efficiently extracts typical patterns from graph-structured data by stepwise pair expansion (pairwise chunking). It is very efficient because of its greedy search. We have expanded GBI to construct a decision tree that can handle graph-structured data. DT-GBI constructs a decision tree while simultaneously constructing attributes for classification using GBI. In DT-GBI attributes, namely substructures useful for classification task, are constructed by GBI on the fly during the tree construction. We applied both GBI and DT-GBI to classification tasks of a real world hepatitis data. Three classification problems were solved in five experiments. In the first 4 experiments, DT-GBI was applied to build decision trees to classify 1) cirrhosis and non-cirrhosis (Experiments 1 and 2), 2) type C and type B (Experiment 3), and 3) positive and negative responses of interferon therapy (Experiment 4). As the patterns extracted in these experiments are thought discriminative, in the last experiment (Experiment 5) GBI was applied to extract descriptive patterns for interferon therapy. The preliminary results of experiments, both constructed decision trees and their predictive accuracies as well as extracted patterns, are reported in this paper. Some of the patterns match domain experts' experience and the overall results are encouraging. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.