Granular computing approach for the design of medical data classification systems

Granular computing is a computation theory that imitates human thinking and reasoning by dealing with information at different levels of abstraction/precision. The adoption of granular computing approach in the design of data classification systems improves their performance in dealing with data uncertainty and facilitates handling large volumes of data. In this paper, a new approach for the design of medical data classification systems is proposed. The proposed approach makes use of data granulation in training the classifier. Training data is granulated at different levels and data from each level is used for constructing the classification system. To evaluate performance of the proposed approach, a classification system based on neural network is implemented. Four medical datasets are used to compare performance of the proposed approach to other classifiers: neural network classifier, ANFIS classifier and SVM classifier. Results show that the proposed approach improves classification performance of neural network classifier and produces better accuracy and area under curve than other classifiers for most of the datasets used.