Fuzzy kNNModel Applied to Predictive Toxicology Data Mining

Abstract

A robust method, fuzzy kNNModel, for toxicity prediction of chemical compounds is proposed. The method is based on a supervised clustering method, called kNNModel, which employs fuzzy partitioning instead of crisp partitioning to group clusters. The merits of fuzzy kNNModel are two-fold: (1) it overcomes the problems of choosing the parameter ¿ ¿ allowed error rate in a cluster and the parameter N ¿ minimal number of instances covered by a cluster, for each data set; (2) it better captures the characteristics of boundary data by assigning them with different degrees of membership between 0 and 1 to different clusters. The experimental results of fuzzy kNNModel conducted on thirteen public data sets from UCI machine learning repository and seven toxicity data sets from real-world applications, are compared with the results of fuzzy c-means clustering, k-means clustering, kNN, fuzzy kNN, and kNNModel in terms of classification performance. This application shows that fuzzy kNNModel is a promising method for the toxicity prediction of chemical compounds.