Técnicas de clasificación de data mining: Una aplicación al consumo de tabaco en adolescentes

Abstract

This study is aimed at analysing the predictive power of different psychosocial and personality variables on the consumption or nonconsumption of nicotine in a teenage population using different classification techniques from the field of Data Mining. More specifically, we analyse ANNs - Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) - decision trees, the logistic regression model and discriminant analysis. To this end, we worked with a sample of 2666 teenagers, 1378 of whom do not consume nicotine while 1288 are nicotine consumers. The models analysed were able to discriminate correctly between both types of subjects within a range of 77.39% to 78.20%, achieving 91.29% sensitivity and 74.32% specificity. With this study, we place at the disposal of specialists in addictive behaviours a set of advanced statistical techniques that are capable of simultaneously processing a large quantity of variables and subjects, as well as learning complex patterns and relationships automatically, in such a way that they are very appropriate for predicting and preventing addictive behaviour. © 2014: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia. Murcia (España).