Rough Set Approach for Generation of Classification Rules of Breast Cancer Data

Abstract

Extensive amounts of knowledge and data stored in medical databases require the development of specialized tools for storing, accessing, analysis, and effectiveness usage of stored knowledge and data. Intelligent methods such as neural networks, fuzzy sets, decision trees, and expert systems are, slowly but steadily, applied in the medical fields. Recently, rough set theory is a new intelligent technique was used for the discovery of data dependencies, data reduction, approximate set classification, and rule induction from databases. In this paper, we present a rough set method for generating classification rules from a set of observed 360 samples of the breast cancer data. The attributes are selected, normalized and then the rough set dependency rules are generated directly from the real value attribute vector. Then the rough set reduction technique is applied to find all reducts of the data which contains the minimal subset of attributes that are associated with a class label for classification. Experimental results from applying the rough set analysis to the set of data samples are given and evaluated. In addition, the generated rules are also compared to the well-known IDS classifier algorithm. The study showed that the theory of rough sets seems to be a useful tool for inductive learning and a valuable aid for building expert systems.