Int. J.

Communications, Network and System Sciences, 2022, 15, 149-165

https://www.scirp.org/journal/ijcns
ISSN Online: 1913-3723
ISSN Print: 1913-3715

Data Mining as a Technique for Healthcare

Approach

E. N. Ekwonwune1, C. I. Ubochi1, A. E. Duroha2

Department of Computer Science, Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria

1

Department of Computer Science, Gregory University, Uturu, Nigeria

2

How to cite this paper: Ekwonwune, E.N., Abstract

Ubochi, C.I. and Duroha, A.E. (2022) Data
Mining as a Technique for Healthcare Ap- Data Mining, also known as knowledge discovery in data (KDC), is the proc-
proach. Int. J. Communications, Network ess of uncovering patterns and other valuable information from large data
and System Sciences, 15, 149-165. sets. According to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-mining/, it can be re-
https://doi.org/10.4236/ijcns.2022.159011
ferred to as knowledge mining from data, knowledge extraction, data/pattern
Received: August 17, 2022 analysis, data archaeology, and data dredging. With advance research in
Accepted: September 27, 2022 health sector, there is multitude of Data available in healthcare sector. The
Published: September 30, 2022
general problem then becomes how to use the existing information in a more
Copyright © 2022 by author(s) and useful targeted way. Data Mining therefore is the best available technique.
Scientific Research Publishing Inc. The objective of this paper is to review and analyse some of the different Data
This work is licensed under the Creative Mining Techniques such as Application, Classification, Clustering, Regres-
Commons Attribution International
sion, etc. applied in the Domain of Healthcare.
License (CC BY 4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Open Access
Keywords
Data Mining, Techniques, Relational Database, Knowledge, Clustering,
Classification, Regression, Healthcare

1. Introduction
Nowadays, there is huge amount of data being collected and stored in databases
everywhere across the globe running into terabytes of data and the tendency is to
keep increasing year after year. Today, the healthcare industry which is one of
the largest industries throughout the world includes medical industries having
the large amounts of health-related and medical-related data. It also includes
thousands of hospitals, clinics and other types of facilities that provide primary,
secondary and tertiary levels of care. The delivery of healthcare service is the
most visible part of any healthcare system, both to users and the general public.
Accurate, early and error-free diagnosis and treatment given to patients has been

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E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

a major issue highlighted in medical service nowadays. Quality service in health

care field implies diagnosing patients correctly and administering treatments
that are effective. To achieve a correct and cost-effective treatment, a system can
be developed to fulfill the task.
Today, healthcare systems use hospital information systems to manage their
healthcare or patient data. These systems generate huge amounts of medical data
which may contain electronic patient records with their computer-readable en-
tries like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs), signals like Electrocardiography
(ECG), clinical information like blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol levels,
etc. as well as the physician’s interpretation. These data may comprise a lot of
invaluable information and knowledge hidden in such databases, which can be
used to support effective clinical decision-making. But the discovery of hidden
patterns and knowledge from such databases often goes unexploited. This explo-
sive growth of data requires an automated way to extract what is called “nuggets
of knowledge” from the large sets of data for the diagnosis and treatment of dis-
ease from the database and this increasingly becomes necessary. Conventionally,
the data is analyzed manually using retrospective tools typical of decision sup-
port systems and many hidden and potentially useful relationships may not be
recognized by the analyst because it lies outside their expectations. The research
purpose is to find alternatives to the solution of complex medical diagnosis in
detection or prediction of heart disease where human knowledge is apprehended
in a general fashion. Successful application examples shown previously, reveal
that human diagnostic capabilities are significantly worse than computer-aided
diagnostic systems.
Advanced data mining techniques in medicine can deal with this problem and
remedy the situation. Data mining can improve the management level of hospit-
al information, saving time and cost. Using data mining techniques, we can ex-
tract interesting knowledge and regularities. The discovered knowledge can then
be applied to the medical data to increase the working efficiency and help medi-
cal practitioners in their decision-making. This provides near-endless opportun-
ities for symptom trend detection, earlier detection of illness, and DNA trend
analysis, etc. thus increasing efficiency in healthcare.
While developed countries like the United States have their systems auto-
mated already and Intelligent Systems are increasingly being deployed in medi-
cine and healthcare, to practically aid the busy clinician and to improve the
quality of patient care, developing countries like Nigeria still make use of tradi-
tional statistical methods., But with the help of data mining, we can also join the
moving trend.
According to [1], Data Mining consists of five major elements viz:
• Extract, transform and load data onto data warehouse system.
• Store and manage the data in multidimensional database.
• Provide data access to analysts.
• Analyze the data by application software.

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• Present the data in useful format.

Steps in a Data Mining Process are:
1) Data integration: first of all, data is collected from and integrated from all
different sources.
2) Data selection: data is selected on behalf of some criteria.
3) Data preprocessing: data collected may contain errors, inconsistencies that
need to be removed.
4) Data transformation: the data even after preprocessing may not be ready
for mining so it needs to be transformed into a form appropriate for mining.
5) Knowledge discovery: meaningful patterns are extracted from large data. At
last, meaningful patterns help in decision-making [1].
Data mining is vastly being used in solving numerous research problems. Data
mining is becoming increasingly popular and essential in healthcare sector [2].
Data mining applications can provide advantage to all parties involved in the
healthcare industry [3] [4]. For example, data mining can help healthcare insur-
er detect fraud and abuse, physicians identify effective treatments and best prac-
tices and patients receive better and more affordable healthcare services [5].
Huge amount of data generated by healthcare transactions are too complex and
voluminous to be processed and analyze by traditional methods. Data mining
provides the methodology and technology to transform these amounts of data
into useful information for decision-making in healthcare sector.

Statement of Problem
Data Mining as an analytic process is designed to extract useful data, patterns
and trends from a large amount of data (typically business, medical or market
related data) by using techniques like clustering, classification, association and
regression. The ultimate goal of data mining is prediction. Research statistics
have shown that most healthcare-related diseases make use of data mining tech-
niques that do not create optimal results.
Below are some of the various inconsistencies associated with the use of the
wrong data mining techniques:
1) Not having very high accuracy in decision.
2) Shortage of expertise.
3) Difficulties in knowledge upgrade.
4) Time-dependent performance (very time-consuming).
Because of these problems, there is necessity to deploy data mining to provide
the assistance mechanism in diagnosis procedure. The conclusion is clear: hu-
mans and their statistical methods cannot ad hoc analyze complex data without
errors. In medicine and healthcare where safety is critical, it is important if data
mining techniques are to be widely accepted in clinical practice [6].
The goal of the process is to take the medical data which contain many attributes
and determine which ones are actually relevant to the diagnosis, symptoms and
result of heart disease. Without automatic methods for extracting this informa-

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tion, it is practically impossible to mine for them, seeing that we are looking at a
very huge amount of data running into terabytes of data.

2. Literature Review
2.1. Conceptual Framework
The healthcare industry battles with millions of digitally recorded data and pat-
terns being collected at enormous speed due to the widespread usage of powerful
computer devices nowadays [7]. The data collected are mostly unorganized and
have not been used properly for appropriate applications, thus, imposing new
challenges regarding their management including their modeling, storage, and
retrieval capabilities. There is often interesting knowledge in the data that is not
readily evident. The spread of electronic patient records, with their comput-
er-readable entries e.g. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), signals like ECG
(Electrocardiography), clinical information like blood sugar, blood pressure,
cholesterol levels, etc. as well as the physician’s interpretation is opening new
possibilities for medical data mining and a world of virtual research [8].
Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) and Data Mining (DM) provide a
solution to the information flood problem by extracting valid, novel, potentially
useful, and ultimately understandable patterns from data [9]. Patterns constitute
compact and rich in semantics representations of raw data [10]; compact by
means that they summarize, to some degree, the amount of information con-
tained in the original raw data and rich in semantics by means that they reveal
new knowledge hidden in the abundance of raw data.
Different data mining tasks achieve different insights over the data: classifica-
tion captures the class of data or a new item, clusters reveal natural groups in
data, decision trees detect characteristics that predict (with respect to a given
class attribute) the behavior of future records, and so on [11]. This unorganized
data requires processing to be done to generate meaningful and useful informa-
tion from the large databases. In order to organize large amount of data, you
implement the concept of Database Management Systems (DBMS) such as
Oracle, and SQL Server. These Database Management Systems require you to
use SQT, a specialized query language to retrieve data from a database. However,
the use of SQT is not always adequate to meet the end user requirements of spe-
cialized and sophisticated information from an unorganized large data bank.
Database researchers pay more attention to the issues related to the volume of
data and also concerned with the effective use of the available database tech-
niques such as efficient data retrieval mechanisms. This therefore necessitates
you to look for certain alternative techniques to retrieve information from large
and mostly unorganized sources of data.
Nowadays, data stored in medical databases are growing in an increasingly
rapid way. Analyzing that data is crucial for medical decision-making and man-
agement [12]. It has been widely recognized that medical data analysis can lead
to an enhancement of health care by improving the performance of patient

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management tasks. There are two main aspects that define the need for medical
data analysis:
1) Support of specific knowledge-based problem solving activities through the
analysis of patients’ raw data collected in monitoring.
2) Discovery of new knowledge that can be extracted through the analysis of
representative collections of example cases, described by symbolic or numeric
descriptors. For these purposes, the increase in database size makes traditional
manual data analysis to be insufficient. To fill this gap, new research fields such
as knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) have rapidly grown in recent years.
KDD is concerned with the efficient computer-aided acquisition of useful know-
ledge from large sets of data.
It also includes the choice of encoding schemes, preprocessing, sampling, and
projections of the data prior to the data mining step.
Data Mining refers to the application of algorithms for extracting patterns
from data without the additional steps of the KDD process [12]. The KDD
process is often to be nontrivial; however, we take the larger view that KDD is an
all-encompassing concept. KDD is a process that involves many different steps.
The input to this process is the data, and the output is the useful information de-
sired by the users. However, the objective may be unclear or inexact. The process
itself is interactive and may require much elapsed time. To ensure the usefulness
and accuracy of the results of the process, interaction throughout the process
with both domain experts and technical experts might be needed.
Data mining is the step in the process of knowledge discovery in databases,
that inputs predominantly cleaned, transformed data, searches the data using
algorithms, and outputs patterns and relationships of interest in a particular re-
presentational form or a set of such representations as classification rules or
trees, regression and clustering, to the interpretation/evaluation step of the KDD
process. The definition clearly implies that what data mining (in this view) dis-
covers are hypotheses about patterns and relationships. Those patterns and rela-
tionships are then subject to interpretation and evaluation before they can be
called knowledge.
A simple data mining process model includes the following steps [13]:
1) Select a target data set.
2) Data preprocessing.
3) Data transformation.
4) Data mining.
5) Interpretation/evaluation.
6) Presentation.
7) Documentation: Simply the documentation and reporting it to interested
parties are done at this last step.
Whereas in unsupervised learning no training set is used. Each data mining
technique serves a different purpose depending on the modeling objective. The
two most common modeling objectives are classification and prediction. Classi-
fication models predict categorical labels (discrete, unordered) while prediction

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E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

models predict continuous-valued functions [14]. Several data mining algo-

rithms are used in IQ diagnosis of heart disease such as Naive Bayes, Decision
Tree, neural network, kernel density, bagging algorithm, and support vector
machine showing different levels of accuracies. Alternative names to data min-
ing are: knowledge discovery mining) in databases (KDD), knowledge extrac-
tion, data/patterns analysis, data archeology, data dredging, information har-
vesting, business intelligence, etc.

2.2. Techniques of Data Mining

According to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-mining/, Data Mining has
been integrated with many other techniques from other domains such as statis-
tics, machine learning, pattern recognition, database and data warehouse sys-
tems, information retrieval, visualization, etc. to gather more information about
the data and to help predict hidden patterns, future trends, and behaviours and
allows businesses to make decisions (see Figure 1 below). Over the past two
decades, it is clear that we have been able to develop systems that collect massive
amounts of data in health care, but now what do we do with it?
Data mining methods use powerful computer software tools and large clinical
databases, sometimes in the form of data repositories and data warehouses, to
detect patterns in data. Within data mining methodologies, one may select from
an extensive array of techniques or patterns types that include, among many
others, classification, clustering, and association rules [12].
Technically, data mining is the computational process of analyzing data from
different perspectives, dimensions, angles and categorizing/summarizing it into
meaningful information.
Data Mining can be applied to any type of data e.g. Data Warehouses, Trans-
actional Databases, Relational Databases, Multimedia Databases, Spatial Data-
bases, Time-series Databases, World Wide Web.

Figure 1. Data mining techniques. Source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-mining/.

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 E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

The whole process of Data Mining consists of three main phases. This is
shown in Figure 2 below:
1) Data Pre-processing—Data cleaning, integration, selection, and transfor-
mation take place.
2) Data Extraction—Occurrence of exact data mining.
3) Data Evaluation and Presentation—Analyzing and presenting results.

2.3. Factors Driving Data Mining

Data mining has come of age because of the confluence of three factors:
• The first is the ability to inexpensively capture, store and process tremendous
amounts of data.
• The second is advances in database technology that allow the stored data to
be organized and stored in ways that facilitate speedy answers to complex
queries.
• Finally, there are developments and improvements in analysis methods that
allow them to be effectively applied to these very large and complex databases
[15].

2.3.1. Advantages of Data Mining in Medicine

According to [15], there are numerous advantages associated with data mining
in medicine some of which are listed below:
• Earlier detection of illness.
• Symptom trends.
• Data analysis.
• Improved drug reactions.
• Provides new knowledge from existing data.
• Public databases.

Figure 2. Data evaluation and presentation. Source:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-mining/.

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E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

• Government sources.
• Company or healthcare Databases.
• Old data can be used to develop new knowledge.
• New knowledge can be used to improve services or products.
• Improvements lead to:
Bigger profits.
More efficient service.

2.3.2. Disadvantages of Data Mining in Medicine

• No uniform language-Medical.
• Incomplete records.
• Privacy, etc.

2.4. Methodological Studies

Data mining has played an important role in the intelligent medical systems
[16]. The relationships of disorders and the real causes of the disorders and the
effects of symptoms that are spontaneously seen in patients can be evaluated by
the users via the constructed software easily. Large databases can be applied as
the input data to the software by using the extendibility of the software. Know-
ledge of the risk factors associated with heart disease helps healthcare profes-
sionals to identify patients at high risk of having heart disease. Statistical analysis
and data mining techniques help healthcare professionals in the diagnosis of
heart disease. Throughout the years, many algorithms were created to extract
what is called nuggets of knowledge from large sets of data. There are several
different methodologies to approach this problem like Classification, Regression
Trees, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, etc.

2.4.1. Classification
In their opinion, [1] stated that Classification is the process of predicting output
based on some given input data. The goal of classification is to accurately predict
the target class for each case in the data [17]. In order to predict the data, it
processes the training set and predictive set. It first develops relationships be-
tween the attributes of training data set. Then it is provided with the predictive
data set, which contains similar attributes but with different data values. Then it
analyzes the given data and produces prediction by placing the different data sets
in different classes based on the relationship of attributes [18] [19]. For example,
in a medical database; the training set would have relevant patient information
based on its previous records, whereas the prediction attribute is whether the pa-
tient has chances of heart attack as shown in Table 1 and Table 2.
Classification uses predictive rules expressed in the form of IF-THEN rules
where the first part (IF part) consists of conjunction of conditions and the second
part (THEN part) predicts a certain prediction attribute value that satisfies the
first part. Using the above example, a rule predicting the first row in the training
set may be represented as follows: IF (age = 62 and heart rate > 72) or (age > 60 and

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 E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

Table 1. Training set. Source: Kamna Solanki et al., 2016.

AGE HEART RATE BLOOD PRESSURE HEART PROBLEM

62 79 145/70 YES
35 82 115/75 YES
79 65 110/68 NO

Table 2. Predictive set. Source: Kamna Solanki et al., 2016.

AGE HEART RATE BLOOD PRESSURE HEART PROBLEM

45 96 143/69 ?

63 54 108/73 ?

83 95 115/68 ?

blood pressure > 140/70) then Heart problem = yes. This technique provide 80%
prediction rate, but the optimal solution is a rule with 100% prediction rate;
which is very hard to achieve. Following are the classification techniques used in
health care.

2.4.2. Decision Trees

Decision tree is similar to flow chart in which every non-leaf node denotes a test
on a particular attribute and every branch represents an outcome of the test.
Root node is the topmost node in the decision tree. For example, with the help of
readmission tree, we can decide whether a patient needs to be readmitted or not.
Using Decision Tree, a decision maker can choose the best alternative and tra-
versal from root to leaf indicates unique class separation based on maximum in-
formation gain [20] [21]. Decision tree are self-explanatory and easy to follow. Set
of rules can also be constructed with the help of decision tree. Decision Tree can be
considered as nonparametric method because there is no need to make assump-
tions regarding distribution of space and structure of classifier. Decision tree have
several disadvantages. These are: Most of the algorithm like ID# and C4.5 require
target attributes to have discrete values as decision tree use divide and conquer
strategy. More the complex relationship among attributes lesser is the performance.

2.4.3. Support Vector Machines (SVM)

Vladimir Vapnik first introduced idea of Support Vector Machine [22]. Its ac-
curacy is better than all other available techniques. It was first introduced for
binary classification problems; but it can be further extended to multi class
problems. It creates hyper-planes to separate data points [23].
It can be implemented in 2 ways:
1) Mathematical programming.
2) Using kernel functions.
With the help of training data sets, non-linear functions can be easily mapped
to high dimensional space. This can only be possible using kernel functions like
Gaussian, sigmoid, etc.

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2.4.4. Neural Network (NN)

It was developed in 20th century. Neural network was regarded as the best classi-
fication algorithm before the introduction of decision tree and SVM which has
far better results. This was the reason that encouraged NN as the most widely
used classification algorithm in various bio-medicine and healthcare fields. For
example, NN has been used as the algorithm supporting the diagnosis of diseases
like cancer and predicting outcomes. In NN, basic elements are nodes or neurons.
These neurons are interconnected and within the network they work together to
produce the output functions. They are fault tolerant as they are capable of pro-
ducing new observations from the existing observations in those situations
where some neurons within the network fail. An activation number is associated
with each neuron and a weight is assigned to each edge within the NN. The basic
property of NN is that it can minimize the error by adjusting its weights and by
making changes in its structure as it is adaptive in its nature. One major advan-
tage of NN is that it can properly handle noisy data for training and can reason-
ably classify the new type of data which is different from training data. There are
also various disadvantages of NN. First, it requires many parameters including
the optimum no of hidden layer nodes that are empirically determined and its
classification performance is very sensitive to the parameters selected. Second,
its training or learning process is very slow and expensive.
Table 3 depicts the usage of Classification techniques in healthcare sector.

2.4.5. Regression
Regression is a data mining technique that helps in identifying those functions
that are useful in order to demonstrate the correlation among different variables.
It is a mathematical tool and can be easily constructed using training data sets.
Regression can be classified into linear and non-linear based on certain count of

Table 3. Usage history of classification techniques in HealthCare Sector. Source: Kamna Solanki et al.

Researcher Technique used Purpose

1. Hu et al. [12] SVM, decision tree, bagging and boosting. To analyze micro array data.

2. Huang et al. [13] Hybrid SVM based diagnosis model For breast cancer.
3. Khan et al. [14] Decision tree For breast cancer.

4. Chang et al. [15] Integrated Decision tree model. For skin diseases in adults and children.

5. Curiac et al. [16] Bayesian method For psychiatric disease.

6. Moon et al. [17] Decision tree algorithm To characterize the smoking behaviour among
smokers by assessing their psychological health
conditions and consumption of alcohol.

7. Chien et al. [18] Hybrid decision tree classifier. For chronic disease.

8. Shouman et al. [19] K-NN classifier. For heart disease.

9. Liu et al. [20] Fuzzy-NN classifier. For thyroid disease.

10. Er et al. [21] Artificial Neural network For chest disease.

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 E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

independent variables. In order to estimate association between two types of va-

riable in which one is dependent variable and another one is independent varia-
ble, linear regression is used. One of the disadvantages of this technique is that it
cannot be used for categorized data. The categorical data can be used with the
help of logistic regression. Usage of Regression for health sector has been sum-
marized in Table 4.

2.4.6. Clustering
It is an unsupervised learning technique which is different from classification
technique (supervised learning method). It is best suited for large amount of da-
ta. It works by observing independent variables. The main task is to form clus-
ters from large databases on the basis of similarity measure. Different types of
clustering algorithms are defined in Table 5 and various clustering algorithms
used in health care are described in Table 6.

2.5. Applications of Data Mining

According to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-mining/, Data Mining can be

Table 4. Usage history of regression techniques in HealthCare sector. Source: Kamna Solanki et al.

Researcher Technique used Purpose

1. Divya et al. [22] Weighted SV Regression To provide better healthcare services by

continuously monitoring patients.

2. Xie et al. [23] Regression decision tree algorithm To study number of hospitalization days.

3. Alapont et al. [24] Linear regression For effective utilization of hospital resources.

Table 5. Types of clustering algorithms in Healthcare sector. Source: Source: Kamna Solanki et al.

Technique Description

1. Partitioned Clustering With the help of “n” data points maximum possible of “k” clusters
is obtained by relocating objects to “k” clusters.

2. Hierarchical Clustering Data points are partitioned in tree form either top-down or bottom-up.

3. Density-based Clustering It can handle cluster of any arbitrary shape whereas above two can
handle only spherical shape clusters.

Table 6. Usage history of clustering techniques in Healthcare sector. Source: Kamna Solanki et al.

Researcher Technique used Purpose

1. Chen et al. [25] Hierarchical clustering To analyze micro-array data.

2. Chipman et al. [26] Hybrid Hierarchical clustering. To analyze micro-array data.

3. Bertsimas et al. [27] Clustering algorithm To predict health care cost.

4. Peng Y et al. [28] Clustering algorithm To detect healthcare frauds.

5. Belciug et al. [29] Hierarchical, partitioned and Efficient utilization of

density-based clustering. healthcare resources.

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E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

applied in the following Areas as shown in Figure 3 below:

1. Financial Analysis 2. Biological Analysis 3. Scientific Analysis
4. Intrusion Detection 5. Fraud Detection 6. Research Analysis

Applications of Data Mining in Healthcare Domain

Applications of data mining in healthcare have already led to some measurable
improvements in patient care [24]. New York-Presbyterian Hospital has reduced
the rate of potentially fatal blood clotting in patients by using analytics software,
Dr Nicholas Morrissey, a surgeon involved in the effort, said on an interview. As
patients were being admitted, the hospital started using Microsoft software in
2010 to scan records for risk factors, such as cancer, smoking and the amount of
time patients were bed-bound. By letting the software rather than the hospital
staffs make the assessment, doctors saved time and made better evaluations,
Morrissey said. The clotting now happens at a rate of 0.23 incidents per 1000 pa-
tient days, as against 0.33 incidents per 1000 patient days before implementation
of the software, Morrissey said. “I won’t be out there saying that we’ve solved the
problem, but we’re definitely making progress-that was a significant drop”, he
said.
In the opinion of [25], the successful application of data mining in various
domains such as marketing, retail, engineering or banking has led to the expan-
sion of its horizon to new fields, namely medicine and public health. Nowadays,
an increasing number of data mining applications focus on analyzing health care
centers for a better health management, or to detect disease outbreaks in hospit-
als, to prevent patients’ deaths, and, obviously, to detect fraudulent insurance
claims [21] [26] [27] [28].
Data mining provides the methodology and technology to discover knowledge
from the huge amount of data and furthermore, this knowledge is used for deci-
sion making. In [27] the author discusses the capability of data mining to improve

Figure 3. Application of data mining. Source:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-mining/.

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 E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

the quality of the decision-making process in pharma industry. One of the major
problems with pharmaceutical data is actually the lack of information. Predict-
ing drug behaviour is essential to find out if the treatment helps the patients or
their health status gets worse. Data mining can help experts in healthcare man-
agement [29] to make decisions in the sector of customer relationship manage-
ment. Patients will receive better and more affordable healthcare services if large
amount of data about the degree of other patients’ satisfaction regarding medical
sector will be analyzed and adequately interpreted. Biological databases may be
considered the raw material for multi-relational data mining techniques [30],
due to their wide variety of data types, often with complex relational structure.
At the University of Alabama [31], there was implemented a surveillance sys-
tem that uses data mining techniques (association rules) in order to identify new
and interesting patterns in the infection control data. Data collected over one
year (1996) were analyzed and three separate analyses were conducted, each one
using a different size of data partition.
In the research [32], it is presented the case study of American Healthways
which provides diabetes management services to hospitals and health plans so
that to enhance the quality and lower the cost of treating patients with diabetes.
The authors of the present article focus their research on applying data min-
ing techniques in order to classify patients with thyroid disorders. In the litera-
ture existing on the diagnosis of thyroid diseases, the authors have identified the
following data mining algorithms: decision trees, artificial neural networks,
support vector machine, expert systems, etc. For example, the diagnosis of thy-
roid disorders by using ANN’s is discussed in [33] [34] [35]. In [33], authors
used data related to UCI site, collected in 1992 by James Cook University, Towns-
ville of Australia. The total number of laboratory samples was 215. Data mining
algorithm used five attributes as predictors and one attribute as a target. By se-
lecting a hidden layer, the Logsig activation function for the hidden layer and 6
neurons from this layer, the level of classification accuracy was 98.6% in case of
thyroid disease. The software used for testing the model was MATLAB 2012. In
[34], authors present their work with respect to three ANN algorithms for the
diagnosis of thyroid disease: the Back propagation algorithm (BPA), the radial
basis function (RBF) Networks and the learning vector quantization (LVQ)
networks. After the model evaluation, LVQ network had the best accuracy rate,
i.e. 98%.
The classification of thyroid nodules was performed with support vector ma-
chines in [36]. In [37] there is presented a comparison study on data mining
classification algorithms (C 4.5, C5.0) for the thyroid cancer. The authors of [37]
used a database with 400 records extracted from the UCI thyroid database and
29 attributes. The study indicated that the confidence level for the rule set gen-
erated by C5.0 was higher than 95%. In [37], C4.5 approach was implemented in
java platform by using Eclipse and XP operating system. A diagnosis expert sys-
tem based on fuzzy rules is described in [38], while a three-stage expert system

DOI: 10.4236/ijcns.2022.159011 161 Int. J. Communications, Network and System Sciences

E. N. Ekwonwune et al.

based on support vector machines is discussed in [39]. The system proposed in

[39] reached the highest accuracy reported so far in the classification of thyroid
disorders, by using a 10-fold cross-validation method, with the mean accuracy of
97.49% and with the maximum accuracy of 98.59%.
In the following section of the paper, the authors shall present a case study on
the classification models applied to a database containing records about indi-
viduals with thyroid diseases. The data set consisted in 756 records extracted
from UCI Machine Learning Repository [40]. We used 21 attributes as predic-
tors and a class attribute. In the experiments described below, there were used
CART and TreeNet models. By comparing the obtained results with those exist-
ing in the above-mentioned studies, in most of our experiments, the accuracy of
CART model was over 93%, the highest value being 96.86%, for the following
settings: Priors = Equal, Costs = 0.5, Parent node min cases = 10, Terminal node
min cases = 1, Partition = 0.6. The accuracy of TreeNet model was 94.97%.

3. Summary and Conclusion

This research work discussed vital issues bothering on Data Mining as a Tech-
nique applied in Healthcare Industry. Some of these concepts discussed as Tech-
niques include but are not limited to the following: Classification, Regression,
Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, etc. This work also concludes that
data mining is of great importance in the solution of healthcare problems. Data
mining, however, is not a “silver bullet” capable of solving all of Cardiovascular
Diseases, but rather it aims at providing possible prevention methods, remedies
and symptoms.
Some diseases pose a serious life-threatening risk globally across all races and
age groups. But most of them could be controlled and risk reduced through a
proper medical checkup, proper dieting, nutrition, healthy eating habits and ex-
ercising all of which are incorporated into our data mining software for easy
access.
This work also highlighted that the main goal of achieving high accuracy and
efficiency which is very important in healthcare sector still remains an open re-
search issue.

Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this pa-
per.

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