Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription or Fee Access

Cost-Sensitive Neural Network for Optimizing Medical Expenditures of Populations

Kiarash Zahirnia, Mehdi Teimouri

Abstract



For critical and costly medical issues hospitals, governments, and insurance companies often incur asymmetrically large costs for misdiagnosis in the form of false negatives. Therefore, hospitals are incentivized to perform many medical tests to prevent misdiagnosis. But since each test itself incurs a cost, a critical question occurs: which tests need to be performed for which patients to minimize the total cost across all patients, including the cost of the medical tests and cost of misdiagnosis. Using machine learning techniques, we can learn to minimize this cost for future patients based on previous training data. Conventional machine learning methods cannot handle the asymmetric effect of misdiagnosis, and do not choose which features are more important for each individual instance. For this scenario, cost-sensitive machine learning should be used. In this paper, a new method of cost-sensitive machine learning is proposed. The proposed method uses two different strategies to make decision for patients with unknown features. We evaluate the proposed method by comparing to some of the most common cost-sensitive learning methods and show superior results in many cases. We apply these methods to nine real-world medical datasets.

Keywords


Cost sensitive learning; Feature cost; Misclassification cost; Neural network; Medicine.

Full Text:

PDF


Disclaimer/Regarding indexing issue:

We have provided the online access of all issues and papers to the indexing agencies (as given on journal web site). It’s depend on indexing agencies when, how and what manner they can index or not. Hence, we like to inform that on the basis of earlier indexing, we can’t predict the today or future indexing policy of third party (i.e. indexing agencies) as they have right to discontinue any journal at any time without prior information to the journal. So, please neither sends any question nor expects any answer from us on the behalf of third party i.e. indexing agencies.Hence, we will not issue any certificate or letter for indexing issue. Our role is just to provide the online access to them. So we do properly this and one can visit indexing agencies website to get the authentic information. Also: DOI is paid service which provided by a third party. We never mentioned that we go for this for our any journal. However, journal have no objection if author go directly for this paid DOI service.