Information Gained Subgroup Discovery in Datasets. (arXiv:2307.15089v1 [cs.LG])

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death. More than 238,340 new cases
of lung cancer patients are expected in 2023, with an estimation of more than
127,070 deaths. Choosing the correct treatment is an important element to
enhance the probability of survival and to improve patient’s quality of life.
Cancer treatments might provoke secondary effects. These toxicities cause
different health problems that impact the patient’s quality of life. Hence,
reducing treatments toxicities while maintaining or improving their
effectivenes is an important goal that aims to be pursued from the clinical
perspective. On the other hand, clinical guidelines include general knowledge
about cancer treatment recommendations to assist clinicians. Although they
provide treatment recommendations based on cancer disease aspects and
individual patient features, a statistical analysis taking into account
treatment outcomes is not provided here. Therefore, the comparison between
clinical guidelines with treatment patterns found in clinical data, would allow
to validate the patterns found, as well as discovering alternative treatment
patterns. In this work, we present Information Gained Subgroup Discovery, a
Subgroup Discovery algorithm that aims to find most relevant patterns taking
into account Information gain and Odds ratio. Thus, we analyze a dataset
containing lung cancer patients information including patients’ data,
prescribed treatments and their outcomes. Obtained results are validated
through clinicians and compared with clinical guidelines. We conclude that this
new algorithm achieves highest acceptance of found patterns in this dataset,
while also improving indices of Subgroup Discovery.