Incremental logistic regression for customizing automatic diagnostic models

Methods Mol Biol. 2015:1246:57-78. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-1985-7_4.

Abstract

In the last decades, and following the new trends in medicine, statistical learning techniques have been used for developing automatic diagnostic models for aiding the clinical experts throughout the use of Clinical Decision Support Systems. The development of these models requires a large, representative amount of data, which is commonly obtained from one hospital or a group of hospitals after an expensive and time-consuming gathering, preprocess, and validation of cases. After the model development, it has to overcome an external validation that is often carried out in a different hospital or health center. The experience is that the models show underperformed expectations. Furthermore, patient data needs ethical approval and patient consent to send and store data. For these reasons, we introduce an incremental learning algorithm base on the Bayesian inference approach that may allow us to build an initial model with a smaller number of cases and update it incrementally when new data are collected or even perform a new calibration of a model from a different center by using a reduced number of cases. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated by employing different benchmark datasets and a real brain tumor dataset; and we compare its performance to a previous incremental algorithm and a non-incremental Bayesian model, showing that the algorithm is independent of the data model, iterative, and has a good convergence.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Automation
  • Bayes Theorem
  • Breast Neoplasms / diagnosis
  • Diagnosis*
  • Humans
  • Logistic Models
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Motor Vehicles