language: en

Acquiring and validating background knowledge for machine learning using function decomposition

Blaz Zupan and Saso Dzeroski
Department of Intelligent Systems, Jozef Stefan Institute
1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
(E-mail: Blaz.Zupan@ijs.si, Saso.Dzeroski@ijs.si)

Abstract. Domain or background knowledge is often needed in order to solve difficult problems of learning medical diagnostic rules. Earlier experiments have demonstrated the utility of background knowledge when learning rules for early diagnosis of rheumatic diseases. A particular form of background knowledge comprising typical co-occurrences of several groups of attributes was provided by a medical expert. This paper explores the possibility to automate the process of acquiring background knowledge of this kind. A method based on function decomposition is proposed that identifies typical co-occurrences for a given set of attributes. The method is evaluated by comparing the typical co-occurrences it identifies, as well as their contribution to the performance of machine learning algorithms, to the ones provided by a medical expert.

1 Introduction