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A new co-training-style random forest for computer aided diagnosis

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Abstract

Machine learning techniques used in computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems learn a hypothesis to help the medical experts make a diagnosis in the future. To learn a well-performed hypothesis, a large amount of expert-diagnosed examples are required, which places a heavy burden on experts. By exploiting large amounts of undiagnosed examples and the power of ensemble learning, the co-training-style random forest (Co-Forest) releases the burden on the experts and produces well-performed hypotheses. However, the Co-forest may suffer from a problem common to other co-training-style algorithms, namely, that the unlabeled examples may instead be wrongly-labeled examples that become accumulated in the training process. This is due to the fact that the limited number of originally-labeled examples usually produces poor component classifiers, which lack diversity and accuracy. In this paper, a new Co-Forest algorithm named Co-Forest with Adaptive Data Editing (ADE-Co-Forest) is proposed. Not only does it exploit a specific data-editing technique in order to identify and discard possibly mislabeled examples throughout the co-labeling iterations, but it also employs an adaptive strategy in order to decide whether to trigger the editing operation according to different cases. The adaptive strategy combines five pre-conditional theorems, all of which ensure an iterative reduction of classification error and an increase in the scale of new training sets under PAC learning theory. Experiments on UCI datasets and an application to small pulmonary nodules detection using chest CT images show that ADE-Co-Forest can more effectively enhance the performance of a learned hypothesis than Co-Forest and DE-Co-Forest (Co-Forest with Data Editing but without adaptive strategy).

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China under the Grant Nos.60702033, 60772076 and 2007307000189, the National High-Tec Research and Development Plant of China under the Grant No.2007AA01Z171, the Heilongjiang Science Foundation Key Project under the No. ZJG0705, the Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of Heilongjiang Province in China under the Grant No.JC200611. The authors thank partners from the 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University for collecting and labeling the CT images.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

    Chao Deng & M. Zu Guo

  2. China Mobile Research Institute, Beijing, China

    Chao Deng

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  1. Chao Deng
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  2. M. Zu Guo
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Correspondence to Chao Deng.

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Deng, C., Guo, M.Z. A new co-training-style random forest for computer aided diagnosis. J Intell Inf Syst 36, 253–281 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-009-0105-8

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