Medical Diagnosis Problem Solving Based on the Combination of Genetic Algorithms and Local Adaptive Operations

Abstract

Medical diagnosis can be considered a classification task which classifies disease types from patient’s condition data represented by a set of pre-defined attributes. This study proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm based classification method to develop classifiers for multidimensional pattern classification problems related with medical decision making. The classification problem can be solved by identifying separation boundaries which distinguish the various classes in the data pattern. The proposed method fits a finite number of regional agents to the data pattern by combining genetic algorithms and local adaptive operations. The local adaptive operations of an agent include expansion, avoidance and relocation, one of which is performed according to the agent’s fitness value. The classifier system has been tested with well-known medical data sets from the UCI machine learning database, showing superior performance to other methods such as the nearest neighbor, decision tree, and neural networks.