Supervised classification of diseases based on an improved associative algorithm

The linear associator is a classic associative memory model. However, due to its low performance, it is pertinent to note that very few linear associator applications have been published. The reason for this is that this model requires the vectors representing the patterns to be orthonormal, which is a big restriction. Some researchers have tried to create orthogonal projections to the vectors to feed the linear associator. However, this solution has serious drawbacks. This paper presents a proposal that effectively improves the performance of the linear associator when acting as a pattern classifier. For this, the proposal involves transforming the dataset using a powerful mathematical tool: the singular value decomposition. To perform the experiments, we selected fourteen medical datasets of two classes. All datasets exhibit balance, so it is possible to use accuracy as a performance measure. The effectiveness of our proposal was compared against nine supervised classifiers of the most important approaches (Bayes, nearest neighbors, decision trees, support vector machines, and neural networks), including three classifier ensembles. The Friedman and Holm tests show that our proposal had a significantly better performance than four of the nine classifiers. Furthermore, there are no significant differences against the other five, although three of them are ensembles.