Methods Inf Med 1990; 29(03): 167-181
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634790
Knowledge-based systems
Schattauer GmbH

Using Connectionist Modules for Decision Support

G. Hripcsak
1   Center for Medical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, U.S.A
› Author Affiliations
This work was supported in part by a grant from the National Library of Medicine LM04419 (IAIMS). I am indebted to Paul D. Clayton, Ph. D., and James J. Cimino, M. D., for their thoughtful comments.
Further Information

Publication History

Publication Date:
07 February 2018 (online)

Abstract

A connectionist model for decision support was constructed out of several back-propagation modules. Manifestations serve as input to the model; they may be real-valued, and the confidence in their measurement may be specified. The model produces as its output the posterior probability of disease. The model was trained on 1,000 cases taken from a simulated underlying population with three conditionally independent manifestations. The first manifestation had a linear relationship between value and posterior probability of disease, the second had a stepped relationship, and the third was normally distributed. An independent test set of 30,000 cases showed that the model was better able to estimate the posterior probability of disease (the standard deviation of residuals was 0.046, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.046-0.047) than a model constructed using logistic regression (with a standard deviation of residuals of 0.062, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.062-0.063). The model fitted the normal and stepped manifestations better than the linear one. It accommodated intermediate levels of confidence well.

 
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