A novel method for fuzzy diagnostic system design

Abstract

Background: In recent years, liver disorders have been continuously increased. Proper performance of data mining techniques in decision-making and forecasting caused to use them commonly in designing of automatic medical diagnostic systems. The main aim of this paper is to introduce a classifier for diagnosis of liver disease that not only has high precision but also is understandable and has been created without expert knowledge. Methods: In regards to this purpose, fuzzy association rules have been extracted from dataset according to fuzzy membership functions which determined by fuzzy C-means clustering method; while each time, extracting fuzzy association rules, one of the five quality measures including confidence, coverage, reliability, comprehensibility and interestingness is used and five fuzzy rule-bases extracted based on them. Then, five fuzzy inference systems are designed on the basis of obtained rule-bases and evaluated in order to choose the best model in terms of diagnostic accuracy. Results: The proposed diagnostic method was examined using data set of Indian liver patients available at UCI repository. Results showed that among considered quality measures, interestingness, reliability and truth outperformed respectively, and yielded precision, sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of more than 90%. Conclusion: In this paper, a classification method was developed to predict liver disease which in addition to high classification accuracy, it has been created without expert knowledge and provided an understandable explanation of data. This method is convenient, user friendly, efficient and requires no expertise.