Multilevel Weighted Support Vector Machine for Classification on Healthcare Data with Missing Values

PLoS One. 2016 May 19;11(5):e0155119. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155119. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

This work is motivated by the needs of predictive analytics on healthcare data as represented by Electronic Medical Records. Such data is invariably problematic: noisy, with missing entries, with imbalance in classes of interests, leading to serious bias in predictive modeling. Since standard data mining methods often produce poor performance measures, we argue for development of specialized techniques of data-preprocessing and classification. In this paper, we propose a new method to simultaneously classify large datasets and reduce the effects of missing values. It is based on a multilevel framework of the cost-sensitive SVM and the expected maximization imputation method for missing values, which relies on iterated regression analyses. We compare classification results of multilevel SVM-based algorithms on public benchmark datasets with imbalanced classes and missing values as well as real data in health applications, and show that our multilevel SVM-based method produces fast, and more accurate and robust classification results.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Benchmarking
  • Data Mining / methods*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Electronic Health Records
  • False Positive Reactions
  • Health Services Research
  • Humans
  • Medical Informatics / instrumentation*
  • Medical Informatics / methods*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Regression Analysis
  • Software
  • Support Vector Machine*

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.