Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 17 (2002) 501-527
Submitted 6/02; published 12/02
(c) 2002 AI Access Foundation and Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. All rights reserved.

Expert-Guided Subgroup Discovery: Methodology and Application



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Expert-Guided Subgroup Discovery:
Methodology and Application

Dragan Gamberger(dragan.gamberger@irb.hr)
Rudjer Boskovic Institute, Bijenicka 54
10000 Zagreb, Croatia

Nada Lavrac (nada.lavrac@ijs.si)
Jozef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39
1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Abstract:

This paper presents an approach to expert-guided subgroup discovery. The main step of the subgroup discovery process, the induction of subgroup descriptions, is performed by a heuristic beam search algorithm, using a novel parametrized definition of rule quality which is analyzed in detail. The other important steps of the proposed subgroup discovery process are the detection of statistically significant properties of selected subgroups and subgroup visualization: statistically significant properties are used to enrich the descriptions of induced subgroups, while the visualization shows subgroup properties in the form of distributions of the numbers of examples in the subgroups. The approach is illustrated by the results obtained for a medical problem of early detection of patient risk groups.





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