In the past decades Machine Learning tools have been successfully used in several medical diagnostic problems. While they
often significantly outperform expert physicians (in terms of diagnostic accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity), they are
mostly not used in practice. One reason for this is that it is dificult to obtain an unbiased estimation of diagnose’s reliability.
We propose a general framework for reliability estimation, based on transductive inference. We show that our reliability estimation
is closely connected with a general notion of significance tests. We compare our approach with classical stepwise diagnostic
process where reliability of diagnose is presented as its post-test probability. The presented approach is evaluated in practice
in the problem of clinical diagnosis of coronary artery disease, where significant improvements over existing techniques are
achieved.
Keywords machine learning - medical diagnosis - reliability estimation - stepwise diagnostic process - coronary artery disease
This paper represents a part of the author’s doctoral dissertation.