The influence of class discretization to attribute hierarchy of decision trees

• Published in: Studies in health technology and informatics Vol. 68; p. 676
• Main Authors: Babic, S H, Kokol, P, Zorman, M, Podgorelec, V
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands 1999
• Subjects: Adult; Breast Feeding; Child Development; Decision Support Systems, Clinical; Decision Support Techniques; Decision Trees; Female; Humans; Infant; Male; Prognosis
• ISSN: 0926-9630
• DOI: 10.3233/978-1-60750-912-7-676

Decision support systems that help physicians are becoming very important part of medical decision making. They are based on different models and the best of them are providing an explanation together with an accurate, reliable and quick response. One of the most viable among decision-making models is the concept of decision trees, already successfully used for many medical decision making purposes. Although effective and reliable, the traditional decision tree construction approach still contains several deficiencies. Therefore we decided to develop and compare several decision supporting models, each of them built with different discretization of attributes and decision classes. For the construction of decision trees we used MtDeciT, in our laboratory developed tool for building decision trees using the classical induction method. All solutions were evolved for determining the influence of basic properties of child and his/her parents to length of successful breastfeeding. A comparison between developed models and obtained results has shown that the way of discretization obviously plays a great role in the reliable and accurate real-world medical decision making.