Knowledge discovery in medical multi-databases: A rough set approach

Abstract

Since early 1980's, due to the rapid growth of hospital in- formation systems (HIS), electronic patient records are stored as huge databases at many hospitals. One of the most important problems is that the rules induced from each hospital may be different from those induced from other hospitals, which are very difficult even for medical experts to interpret. In this paper, we introduce rough set based analysis in order to solve this problem. Rough set based analysis interprets the conflicts between rules from the viewpoint of supporting sets, which are closely related with dempster-shafer theory(evidence theory) and outputs interpretation of rules with evidential degree. The proposed method was evaluated on two medical databases, the experimental results of which show that several interesting relations between rules, including interpretation on difference and the solution of conflicts between induced rules, are discovered.