Reliable probabilistic prediction for medical decision support

Abstract

A major drawback of most existing medical decision support systems is that they do not provide any indication about the uncertainty of each of their predictions. This paper addresses this problem with the use of a new machine learning framework for producing valid probabilistic predictions, called Venn Prediction (VP). More specifically, VP is combined with Neural Networks (NNs), which is one of the most widely used machine learning algorithms. The obtained experimental results on two medical datasets demonstrate empirically the validity of the VP outputs and their superiority over the outputs of the original NN classifier in terms of reliability. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.