Abstract

As Active Mining is a new concept among data mining and/or knowledge discovery in databases communities, in order to validate the effectiveness, it is important to carry out empirical studies using practical data. Based on the concept of Active User Reaction, this paper develops a causal model from liver function test data in a medical domain. To develop the model, we have set a problem to predict the values of ICG test from given observation data and experts' background knowledge. We therefore employ a framework of meta-learning and structural equation modeling. In this paper meta-learning means learning about mined results from multiple data-mining techniques. Structural equation modeling enables us to describe flexible models from background knowledge. The construction of the causal model contains two phases: meta-learning and the model building. The meta-learning phase utilizes both the linear regression and the neural network as data mining techniques, then examines the predictability on the given data set. Mining models are n-folded learned from the training data set. Each of the prediction accuracy of the mining models is compared using with the testing data. On the model building phase, we use structural equation modeling to develop a causal model based on results of meta-learning and background knowledge. We again compare the accuracy of the causal model with each of the mining models. Consequently we have developed the causal model, which is comprehensible and have good predictive performance, via the meta-learning phase. Through the empirical study, we have got the conclusion that the framework of meta-learning is effective in data mining in a difficult medical domain.