Data mining the relationship between psychological and physiological stress measurement using rough set analysis

Recent behavioral medicine studies have revealed that some hormones secreted in human body sensitively changes according to his/her mental stress. Thus it is expected as an objective measurement of mental stress. However this newly developed interdisciplinary studies frequently showed inconsistent results. Some technical reasons were indicated for this discrepancy. Above all, we focused on the fact that in all these studies the only method introduced to estimate the relationship between the level of hormones and the subjective stress scale was the correlation analysis. In this study we employed Rough set analysis in place of conventional linear correlation analysis for mining the relationship between a subjective stress scale, “Profile of Mood Scale” (POMS), and a well known stress biomarker, salivary cortisol. As a developing result, numbers of items (inquiries in POMS) which relatively associated with cortisol level were found, whereas no significant linear correlation was obtained between them.