Supervised discretization can discover risk groups in cancer survival analysis.
Discretization of continuous variables is a common practice in medical research to identify risk patient groups. This work compares the performance of gold-standard categorization procedures (TNM+A protocol) with that of three supervised discretization methods from Machine Learning (CAIM, ChiM and DTree) in the stratification of patients with breast cancer. The performance for the discretization algorithms was evaluated based on the results obtained after applying standard survival analysis procedures such as Kaplan-Meier curves, Cox regression and predictive modelling. The results show that the application of alternative discretization algorithms could lead the clinicians to get valuable information for the diagnosis and outcome of the disease. Patient data were collected from the Medical Oncology Service of the Hospital Clínico Universitario (Málaga, Spain) considering a follow up period from 1982 to 2008.
Computer Science Department, University of Málaga, Campus de Teatinos S/N, 29071 Málaga, Spain; Málaga Biomedical Research Institute (IBIMA), Málaga, Spain. Electronic address: ivan@lcc.uma.es.
Iván
I
Gómez
Málaga Biomedical Research Institute (IBIMA), Málaga, Spain; Virgen de la Victoria Oncology Service, Málaga, Campus de Teatinos S/N, 29071 Málaga, Spain.
Nuria
N
Ribelles
Computer Science Department, University of Málaga, Campus de Teatinos S/N, 29071 Málaga, Spain; Málaga Biomedical Research Institute (IBIMA), Málaga, Spain.
Leonardo
L
Franco
Málaga Biomedical Research Institute (IBIMA), Málaga, Spain; Virgen de la Victoria Oncology Service, Málaga, Campus de Teatinos S/N, 29071 Málaga, Spain.
Emilio
E
Alba
Computer Science Department, University of Málaga, Campus de Teatinos S/N, 29071 Málaga, Spain; Málaga Biomedical Research Institute (IBIMA), Málaga, Spain.
José M
JM
Jerez
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000465:Algorithms; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D013030:Spain; D016019:Survival Analysis
Breast cancer free survival; CAIM; ChiMerge; Decision Trees; Predictive models; TNM protocol