Data preprocessing for decision making in medical informatics: Potential and analysis

Abstract

Clinical databases often comprise noisy, inconsistent, missing, imbalanced and high dimensional data. These challenges may reduce the performance of DM techniques. Data preprocessing is, therefore, essential step in order to use DM algorithms on these medical datasets as regards making it appropriate and suitable for mining. The objective is to carry out a systematic mapping study in order to review the use of preprocessing techniques in clinical datasets. As results, 110 papers published between January 2000 and March 2017 were, selected, analyzed and classified according to publication years and channels, research type and the preprocessing tasks used. This study shows that researchers have paid a considerable amount of attention to preprocessing in medical DM in last decade and a significant number of the selected studies used data reduction and cleaning preprocessing tasks.