Application of an efficient Bayesian discretization method to biomedical data

摘要

BackgroundSeveral data mining methods require data that are discrete, and other methods often perform better with discrete data. We introduce an efficient Bayesian discretization (EBD) method for optimal discretization of variables that runs efficiently on high-dimensional biomedical datasets. The EBD method consists of two components, namely, a Bayesian score to evaluate discretizations and a dynamic programming search procedure to efficiently search the space of possible discretizations. We compared the performance of EBD to Fayyad and Irani's (FI) discretization method, which is commonly used for discretization.