Statistical Learning for Biomedical Data

This book is for anyone who has biomedical data and needs to identify variables that predict an outcome, for two-group outcomes such as tumor/not-tumor, survival/death, or response from treatment. Statistical learning machines are ideally suited to these types of prediction problems, especially if the variables being studied may not meet the assumptions of traditional techniques. Learning machines come from the world of probability and computer science but are not yet widely used in biomedical research. This introduction brings learning machine techniques to the biomedical world in an accessible way, explaining the underlying principles in nontechnical language and using extensive examples and figures. The authors connect these new methods to familiar techniques by showing how to use the learning machine models to generate smaller, more easily interpretable traditional models. Coverage includes single decision trees, multiple-tree techniques such as Random Forests™, neural nets, support vector machines, nearest neighbors and boosting.

Reviews & endorsements

"Some important concepts are explained well including the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning, and describing when specific methods work well and when they don't. They also list twenty canonical questions and point the reader to the sections in the book where these questions are answered. They provide many important examples from biomedical research and illustrate the methods to solve these problems along with the pitfalls of some of them. ... Overall, I think this is a good reference source for biomedical researchers involved in data mining or classification, but the reader should beware of the arguments that are loosely explained."
Michael R. Chernick, Significance

Customer reviews

Product details

• Date Published: March 2011
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9780521699099
• length: 298 pages

• dimensions: 245 x 175 x 11 mm
• weight: 0.6kg
• contains: 47 b/w illus. 25 tables
• availability: Available