A machine learning technique called Graph-Based Induction (GBI) efficiently extracts typical patterns from graph-structured
data by stepwise pair expansion (pairwise chunking). It is very efficient because of its greedy search. We have expanded GBI
to construct a decision tree that can handle graph-structured data. DT-GBI constructs a decision tree while simultaneously
constructing attributes for classification using GBI. In DT-GBI attributes, namely substructures useful for classification
task, are constructed by GBI on the fly during the tree construction. We applied both GBI and DT-GBI to classification tasks
of a real world hepatitis data. Three classification problems were solved in five experiments. In the first 4 experiments,
DT-GBI was applied to build decision trees to classify 1) cirrhosis and non-cirrhosis (Experiments 1 and 2), 2) type C and
type B (Experiment 3), and 3) positive and negative responses of interferon therapy (Experiment 4). As the patterns extracted
in these experiments are thought discriminative, in the last experiment (Experiment 5) GBI was applied to extract descriptive
patterns for interferon therapy. The preliminary results of experiments, both constructed decision trees and their predictive
accuracies as well as extracted patterns, are reported in this paper. Some of the patterns match domain experts’ experience
and the overall results are encouraging.
Keywords Data mining - graph-structured data - Decision Tree Graph-Based Induction - hepatitis dataset analysis