Predictive modeling based on small data in clinical medicine: RBF-based additive input-doubling method

Abstract

The paper considers the problem of handling short sets of medical data. Effectively solving this problem will provide the ability to solve numerous classification and regression tasks in case of limited data in health decision support systems. Many similar tasks arise in various fields of medicine. The authors improved the regression method of data analysis based on artificial neural networks by introducing additional elements into the formula for calculating the output signal of the existing RBF-based input-doubling method. This improvement provides averaging of the result, which is typical for ensemble methods, and allows compensating for the errors of different signs of the predicted values. These two advantages make it possible to significantly increase the accuracy of the methods of this class. It should be noted that the duration of the training algorithm of the advanced method remains the same as for existing method. Experimental modeling was performed using a real short medical data. The regression task in rheumatology was solved based on only 77 observations. The optimal parameters of the method, which provide the highest prediction accuracy based on MAE and RMSE, were selected experimentally. A comparison of its efficiency with other methods of this class has been performed. The highest accuracy of the proposed RBF-based additive input-doubling method among the considered ones is established. The method can be modified by using other nonlinear artificial intelligence tools to implement its training and application algorithms and such methods can be applied in various fields of medicine.

Keywords: RBF; input-doubling method; medicine; neural networks; predictive modeling; small data approach.