Intelligent Data Analysis in Medicine and Pharmacology Intelligent Data Analysis in Medicine and Pharmacology

Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma is a rare but very aggressive tumor. Many factors that might influence the survival of patients have been suggested. The aim of our study was to determine which of the factors, known at the time of admission to the hospital, might predict survival of the patients with anaplastic thyroid carcinoma. Our aim was also to assess the relative importance of the factors and to identify potentially useful decision and regression trees generated by machine learning algorithms. Our study included 126 patients with anaplastic thyroid carcinoma treated at the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana from 1972 to 1992. In this chapter, we compare the machine learning approach with previous statistical evaluations of the problem (univariate and multivariate analysis) and show that it can provide a more thorough analysis and improve the understanding of the data.