Using Learning of Behavior Rules to Mine Medical Data for Sequence Rules

Abstract

In fields like medical care the temporal relations in the records (transactions) are of great help for identifying a particular group of cases. Thus there is some need for sequence rule learning in the classification problems in these fields. In this paper, a genetic algorithm for sequence rule learning is presented based on concepts from learning behavior of agents. The algorithm employs a Michigan-like approach to evolve a group of sequence rules, and extracts good ones into the result sequence rule set from time to time. It contains a novel quality-based intelligent genetic operator, and many adaptive enhancements to make implicit use of data-set-specific knowledge. The algorithm is evaluated on a real-world medical data set from the PKDD 99 Challenge. The results indicate that the algorithm can get satisfactory sequence rule sets from the sparse and noisy data set.