Proceeding of National Conference on Advances in Computer Applications NCACA-2015

Data Mining in Healthcare – A Literature Survey

Dr. B.R. Prakash Dr. M. Hanumanthappa
Department of Computer Science and Department of Computer Science and Uma K
Applications Applications Department of Computer Science and
Sri Siddhartha Institute of Technology, Bangalore University, Applications
Tumkur, India. Bangalore. India. Bangalore University,Bangalore. India.
brp.tmk@gmail.com hanu6572@hotmail.com umak@bub.ernet.in

Abstract- Today a healthcare organization generates a
voluminous data that results lack of information to make the
right decision. Data mining techniques can be used to extract the
needful information from healthcare organizations. Data mining
is also widely used in healthcare for various applications such as
detection of fraud and abuse in healthcare, customer relationship
management, detection of diseases and treatment effectiveness,
and availability of healthcare services at lower cost. This survey
explores the various Data mining techniquesapplied in
healthcare, such as classification, clustering, association rules and
so on. Thus, it is necessary to identify and evaluate the popular
data mining algorithms implemented in healthcare services. The
need for algorithms is to increase the accuracy and efficiency in
healthcare services. This paper also explores the data mining
challenges in healthcare.
healthcare industry to providea medical solution to the
patients at lower cost and make use of hospital resources
effectively. There is a huge potential for data mining
applications in healthcare. Generally, the applications of
Data mining in healthcare are grouped as healthcare
management, customer relationship management, evaluation
of treatment effectiveness, and health insurer detection of
fraud and abuse. With these applications of data mining,
healthcare also includes classifying the patients with high
risk or low risk, patients with similar type of diseases.The
results are used for giving the best treatment. Theutilization
of resources effectively and making healthcare policies
using data mining techniques.

Keywords—Data mining, Data mining techniques, Healthcare

applications.
I. INTRODUCTION
Data mining is the most striving area of researchers
to discover the meaningful information and finding of patterns
in data. The main objective of the data mining is to discover
the knowledge hidden in a huge data. Today, with the rapid
growth of data, Data mining is becoming popularin almost all
industries. Data mining is the most appropriate practice meant
for analyzing and discovering the useful information in
various fields like financial data, Retail industry, Biological
data, Scientific and Engineering applications, Intrusion
detection, Telecommunication, Healthcare and so on. Among
these, Healthcare industry is the vast area to study and apply
data mining techniques to improve Healthcare services [1].
In recent years, the research has been conducted on
various applications of healthcare such as detection of fraud
and abuse, healthcare management, customer relationship
management and treatment effectiveness. Researchers are
more interested in one of the healthcare applications called
treatment effectiveness in which identifying the disease
pattern and symptoms of the diseases and giving better
treatment. For example, research on finding the causes for
diabetic cases, heart diseases, chronic diseases, cancer,
detecting patterns of disease spread in various states of
India, and so on. The other applications of healthcare also
uses Data mining techniques to improve services like
discovering the unusual pattern of claims by physicians,
clinics, health insurers or others, whoever benefit of the
things, maintenance of healthcare industry and manages the
relationship between customers of the healthcare industry.

Healthcare is the practice of caring for human
health in terms of detection of diseases in earlier stage,
giving the effective treatment, preventing the diseases
before it occurred and other physical and mental
impairments in human beings [5]. Nowadays, Data mining
is broadly used in the healthcare industry, since
thehealthcare industry consists of enormous data;however
the data used for effective and efficient decision making
system for finding the hidden patterns. The feature of
healthcare motivatesto use data mining applicationsto aid
better services for healthcare. Data mining applications are
used in healthcare in four ways i) Strategic ii)
Administrative iii) Clinical and iv) Operational. Data mining
techniques can apply to make strategic planning for
The most popular Data mining techniques used in
healthcare are classification, clustering, decision tree,
association rules, neural network, support vector machine and
many more other techniques. For example, classification
method can be used to classify the patients with high risk or
low risk, clusteringtechnique is used to group the patients who
are having similar type of disease, whereas the decision tree
algorithm can help to choose the causes of disease efficiently.
II. DATA MINING AND HEALTHCARE
Data mining is a process of discovering the
previously unknown pattern from large dataset. Data mining is
the most powerful and motivating concept of discovering the

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 Proceeding of National Conference on Advances in Computer Applications NCACA-2015
hidden pattern from the voluminous data. Presently, Data
mining is significantly used in the healthcare industry to
transfer the more complex data into useful information. Due to
existence of huge data in healthcare, there is a need of strong
method to handle the data and extracts the useful information
from healthcare. With the growth and maintenance of large
data repositories of structured and unstructured data, health
organizations are increasingly using data analytics. It also
includes data mining to analyze and utilize the patterns and
relationships found in the data to make improved clinical and
other health-related decisions [6].
Healthcare providers can use data mining to uncover
the previously unknown patterns from vast data stores and
then use this information to build predictive models. By
examining and analyzing the stored patient data, expert data
miners can uncover important trends. Data mining
techniquesare becoming increasingly popular because it offers
benefits to patients, healthcare care providers, healthcare
industry, researchers and health insurers. Providers can use
data analysis to identify effective treatments and best
practices. Data mining can analyze the patient records to
compare the causes, symptoms for providingeffective
treatments. It can also identify clinical best practices to help
in developing guidelines and standards of care. Patients can
receive better, more affordable healthcare services. This is true
only when healthcare managers use applications of data
mining to identify chronic diseases and high risk patients. The
applications are used to design appropriate interventions and
reduce the number of hospital admissions and claims.
III. DATA MINING IN HEALTHCARE APPLICATIONS
Data mining techniques can help healthcare in
various approaches, including four important applications
which are categorized as detection of fraud and abuse,
customer relationship management, healthcare management
and treatment effectiveness.
Detection of fraud and abuse: The fraud and abuse in
healthcare meansclaiming the payment from healthcare by
falsification of statements. It includes intentionally soliciting,
paying, and accepting payment to induce referrals for services
reimbursed by healthcare programs.Statistical methods can be
used to identify general patterns of suspicious transactions in
healthcare data sets.Data mining techniques are the most
valuable tool the healthcare industry can utilize in detecting
fraud and abuse.Data mining techniques can help to discover
the unusual pattern in healthcare in order to detect the fraud
and anomaliesin health insurance and administration [5].
Customer Relationship management: Customer relationship
management is a basic approach for handling interactions
between healthcare organizations and its customers. The
healthcare customers include physicians’ offices, billing
department, inpatient and outpatient settings, call centers of
healthcare and ambulatory care settings [6].The customers
could be patients, pharmacists, physicians or clinics. The
identification of usage and purchase patterns can be used to
improve overall customer satisfaction. Medicine companies
can make profit from healthcare customer relational
management and data mining. Data mining techniques can
help to track which physicians prescribe which drugs and this
helps to medicine companies can decide whom to target.
Healthcare Management: Data Mining for Healthcare
Management is an emerging field where researchers from both
industryand academia. This identifies the potential of its
impact on improving healthcare by discovering patterns and
trends of diagnosis, treatments in large amounts of complex
data generated by healthcare transactions. Data mining has
supported in several aspects of healthcare management,
including diagnosis of diseases, decision-making for
treatments, detection of fraud in medical field, fault detection
of medical devices, healthcare quality improvement strategies
and privacy. Data mining also helps to discover interesting
business understandings to help make better business
decisions that can effectcost efficiency of business and yet
retain a high quality of care. Healthcare management has the
challenge of managing the resources of a hospital. This
problem can be handled by using data mining model. Fitness
report and demographic of details of patients is also useful for
utilizing the available hospital resources effectively [5]. One
of the objectives of healthcare management is to improve the
quality of healthcare, while providing the quality healthcare
services at lower cost and reduce the patient’s length of stay in
hospital. As well as managing the disease efficiently to
improve the results by applying data mining techniques
.
Healthcare effective treatment: Every hospital collects a
large amount of data about patients during their admission
time and treatment time. These data will be stored in the
Electronic Health Record form. From these records, data
mining help physicians to discover the disease pattern faster
and prescribe better treatments. Data mining helps in
identifying the best treatment for specific diseases by
comparing the causes and symptoms of diseases.
IV. CHALLENGES
A huge amount of data is generated by the healthcare
industry that results major challenge for data mining to
achieve the quality and relevant healthcare data. It is hard to
get the accurate and complete healthcare data. The healthcare
data are diverse and complex in nature because it is collected
from different sources such as from the conversation with the
patients or review of physicians, from laboratory report. It is
necessary to maintain the eminence of data from the
healthcare provider, because this data is useful to deliver cost
effective treatments to the patients. Every healthcare
organization collects the minimum data from each and every
patient. This data contains missing data, noisy data, and
incomplete data. Data cleaning has to be done before applying
any data mining technique for data to achieve betterresults [1].
Because the quality of data mining results depends on the
quality of data. The other problem with data mining is to know
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 Proceeding of National Conference on Advances in Computer Applications NCACA-2015
the knowledge of applying data mining techniques on
healthcare data.
V. DATA MINING TECHNIQUES IN HEALTHCARE
Before applying data mining techniques to healthcare
data, researchers must know what kind of data mining
techniques exist and how these techniques will work. Even
though data mining contains many techniques only few among
them are successively used in healthcare field.
Classification
Classification is the process of finding a model that
describes and distinguishes data classes and finds the target
class label. The resulting model is constructed based on the
analysis of a set of training data [7]. Classification is a
supervised learning method to divide the dataset into
predefined categorical class labels. The “class” label indicates
the deciding attribute or feature in a data set, which are used as
a predictive model inputs to test the future data set. The
classification is a two-step process. In the first step, the set of
data will be given as a training set to construct the
classification model called a classifier which consisting of
classification rules. For example, if age = senior AND income
= high THEN loan_decision= safe. Classifying rules are not
necessarily 100% true; generally,rules with 90-95% accuracy
areconsidered as solid rules. In the second step, the set of data
will examine a classification model for accuracy and
efficiency for prediction [1].
Classification is the basic data mining technique used
in the healthcare domain. For example, it can help to classify
the patient’ssyndrome as high, medium, or low risk. Various
classification algorithms are applied to obtain the required
results from the healthcare data. The widely used classification
algorithms in health care are, decision tree, naïve Bayesian
classifier, neural network, Support vector Machine, K-Nearest
Neighbor classifier and so on.
Classification method is successful to select the best attribute
value to classify the given data set since before applying any
classification algorithm on a data set, redundant attributes and
irrelevant attributes are identified using statistical methods
such as correlation analysis. In other words, feature selection
method has been widely used to identify the relevant attributes
to class. These approaches help to improve the accuracy and
efficiency of classification. The cross-validation method is
also used to improve the classification accuracy [6].
Clustering
Clustering is the process of grouping the data into
clusters or classes [7]. Clustering is an unsupervised learning
method and it does not have any predefined classes like in
classification. Clustering is a method of grouping the data set
based on similar features of objects. The similarities of objects
are measured by their attribute value. Every object within the
same cluster are having the high similarity as compared to the
objects belongs to another cluster. Clustering techniques are
categorized into following types.
Partitioned clustering divides the huge data set into a
predefined number of clusters. Based on the choice of cluster
centroid and similarity measure, partition clustering is
categorized into K-means and K-medoid algorithms. The k-
means algorithm is used in healthcare to detect the pattern of
disease spread in various places [4] and clustering the heart
disease patients based on the high BP and cholesterol level of
patients.
Hierarchical clustering splits the huge data set into smaller
subsets, until reach the termination condition. The hierarchical
algorithm decomposes the database in hierarchical way. This
can be represented in two forms (i) Agglomerative (Bottom-
up) approach and (ii) Divisive (Top-down) approach. Belciug
[6]has worked on grouping the patients according to their
length of stay in the hospital using hierarchical clustering
algorithm.
Density based clustering groups the data set based on the
notion of density of objects. It discovers the arbitrary shape of
clusters instead of restricted to only for spherical shape like
partition and hierarchical clustering. For example, it discovers
an image pattern of skin and separates the wound from healthy
skin.
Clustering is generally done when very less or no
information about the data is identified. By grouping the
objects intoa number of clusters will helps to understand the
information about data. Almost every clustering algorithm can
only handle numeric data. However, most healthcare databases
have a number of categorical features. While the conversion of
categorical data into numerical data causes the problem for
clustering. Very few clustering algorithms are efficient to
handle the categorical data.
Association rules
Association is a method that discovers the frequent
patterns of items in a collection. The relationships between co-
occurring items are expressed as association rules. This helps
to business analysis like market basket analysis to find out the
frequently purchased items and relationships among a set of
items in the market. For example, if a customer has a
computer, then the chance of buying antivirus software is high
[1]. The Association is one of the most important techniques
of data mining used in the healthcare field to detect the
relationships among various diseases and drugs. The
association is also used to construct the classifier by
discovering the disease pattern. And it is also helpful for
identifying the fake patterns in healthcare. The widely used
algorithm for association is apriori algorithm. It finds out the
relationships between items in a data set. Hemlata Sharma and
Pallavi Sharma, used aprori algorithm for finding the
relationship between the 5 diseases spread in various states
ofIndia [4]. To improve the association rule mining one can
apply multi-level association.
Regression
Regression is a statistical analysis method to find out
the functions that explain the relationship among different
variables. A regression model is constructed using training
dataset. In this modeling two types of variables are used they
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 Proceeding of National Conference on Advances in Computer Applications NCACA-2015
are, (i) dependent variable (ii) independent variable. There is
only one dependent variable exists in the model, but
independent variables may be one or more. Based on the
number of independent variables regression is of two kinds,
one is linear and another one is Non-linear regression.
Regression method is used in the healthcare field for
predicting the diseases of a patient. Classification and
regression are used for classifying the data based on their
attributes while classification is used where the attributes are
categorical;regression is used where the attributes are
continuous. The logistic regression method is widely used in
the medical field for finding the relative risk condition such as
diabetes, pressure ulcer [1].
VI. LITERATURE REVIEW
A lot of work has been done related to healthcare service using
data mining techniques.
In 2012, Dipti Patil et al., [8], proposed work on
parameter free data mining approach for healthcare
application. In this paper, the authors have worked on
clustering the patients with their health status. The authors
conducted experiments on data collected from Switzerland,
which consist 107 instances and 14 attributes. K-means and
data stream clustering algorithm for clustering the healthcare
data has been used. The corresponding clustering algorithm
results in 83.18% and 87.85% prediction accuracy
respectively.
In 2013, Fanil V. Gada, Kartik R. Yadav, Rupen D.
Shah [3], proposed work on better detection of disease using
data mining. In this work, the researchershave used two
methods to detect the diseases; one among these is Association
rules. This association rules are used to extract the transitive
associations between diseases and symptoms. This will be
helpful to find out the probability of occurrence of disease and
leads to better treatment. Another method “TF-IDF” used for
identification of disease which is most likely to be present.
In 2013, Johannes K. Chiang and Sheng Yin. Huang
[11] had done work on multidimensional data mining for
healthcare service portfolio management. The main objective
of their work is to discover the association rules that hold the
useful data element belonging to the healthcare domain. The
authors used apriori algorithm to achieve their goal with 40K
data and measured the performance using Entropy function.
This article is related to customer relationship management.
In 2014, Data mining approach for exploring factors
associated with pressure ulcer disease work has been done by
Dheeraj Raju, Xiaogang Su, patricia A. Patrician, Lori A.
Loan, and Mary S. McCarthy [2] by taking the full data set
consisting 1653 patient records and categorize the records
based on demographic, lab values and Braden subjects. Later,
applied four important data mining models, namely Logistic
Regression, Decision tree, Random Forest and Multivariate
adaptive regression spline model (MARS) and compare these
techniques with C-Statistic values. According to C-statistic
value the techniques achieved Random Forest - 0.83, Logistic
Regression - 0.82, MARS - 0.78 and Decision trees - 0.63, and
concluded random forest data mining model is among the best.
In 2014, the work of application of data mining in
detecting patterns of disease spread in various states in India
was proposed by Hemlata Sharama and Pallavi Sharma [4].
For this research work the authors have taken the data from
INDIA STAT. And conducted experiments on 5 diseases
namely as “Hepatitis”, “Dengue”, “Acute respiratory”, Kala-
azar”, “Encephalities” on 29 states and union territories of
India. The researchers have used K-means technique to
discover a similar pattern of diseases in the cluster and
(Apriori algorithm) classification with a rule based is used for
finding out the relationships between 5 diseases. The
experiment conducted using TNAGRA tool. From this
experiment, the researchers concluded that based on the
existence of diseases and rate of mortality states such
asHimachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Sikkim are in the same
cluster and Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala,
Madhya Pradesh, Manipura and Mizoram belonging to same
cluster and the rest of the states are in different clusters.
In 2015, Umair Shafique Fiaz Majeed, Haseeb
Quaiser and Irfan Ul Mustafa [10], have been worked on heart
disease to find out the interesting patterns from data of heart
patients. The authors collected online available heart disease
datasets from University of California, Irvine C.A,and
Machine Learning Repository. The selectionof only 14
attributes out of 76 attributes present 597 records by applying
an Attribute selection method using a WEKA tool for different
data. Authors had taken classification which is a data mining
technique and implemented with the following algorithms,
Neural Network, Decision tree and Naïve Bayes and
conducted 4 experiments and achieved82.914% accuracy of
result with a Naïve Bayes classification algorithm.
In 2015, the work has been done on diagnosing
diabetes using data mining techniques by Srideivanai
Nagarajan and R. M. Chandrasekaran [9]. The researchers
conducted experiments on 650 patient records which are
collected from different sources. First, successfully cluster the
records into 3 types using the K - means algorithm.
Afterwards, classify the data into mild, moderate and severe
type based on the level of risk using classification algorithms
such as naïve Bayes, Random tree, simple CART and simple
Logistic. The accuracy of the different algorithms on accuracy
value includes 0.989, 0.975, 1 and 1 respectively.
VII. SUMMARY OF LITERATURE REVIEW
Many researchers have been worked for better
healthcare service using popular data mining techniques and
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 Proceeding of National Conference on Advances in Computer Applications NCACA-2015

algorithms. Table 1 summarizes the various techniques used in [1] Divya Tomar and Sonali Agarwal, “A survey on Data Mining
the field of healthcare and their efficiency. approaches for Healthcare”, International Journal of Bio-
Science and Bio-Technology, Vol.5, No.5 (2013), pp.241-266.

Sl Authors and Application [3] Fanil V. Gada, et al., “Data Mining in Medical Application for
Techniques Accuracy
No. year better detection of disease”, International Journal of Computer
Dipti patil et K-means Clustering 83.18% and Electronics Research [Volume 2, Issue 2, April 2013.
1.
al., 2012 D-stream Clustering 85.75%
Association Detection [4] Hemlata Sharma and Pallavi Sharma, “Application of Data
Fanil V. Gada Mining In Detecting Pattern of Disease Spread in Various
2. rule and TF- of disease NA
et al., 2013 States of India”, International Journal of advanced Research in
ID
Portfolio Computer Science and Software Engineering, Vol. 4, Issue 6,
Johannes K
Apriori June 2014.
3. Chiang et al.,
algorithm
manageme NA
2013 nt [5] Hian Cbye Kob and Gerald Tan, “Data mining Applications in
Logistic Pressure Healthcare”, Journal of Healthcare Information management-
0.83
Regression Ulcer Vol.19, No.2.
DheerajRaju
Random PU 0.82
4. forest [6] Illhoi Yoo et al., “Data Mining in healthcare and bio
et al., 2014
Regression PU 0.78 Medicine; A survey of the Literature”, J Med Syst (2012)
spline model 36:2431-2448, DOI 10.1007/s10916-011-9710-5.
Decision tree PU 0.63 [7] Jaiwei Han and Micheline Kamber, “Data Mining Concepts
Discover and Techniques”, Second Edition, ISBN 13:978-1-55860-901-
K-means pattern of 3.
disease [8] Johannes K. Chiang et al., “Multidimensional Data Mining
Hemlata
For Healthcare Service Portfolio management”, 978-1-4673-
5. Sharam et al., Relationshi NA
5214-7/13.
2014 Apriori p
Algorithm B/w [9] Prof. Dipti Patil, et al., “An Adaptive parameter free data
Disease mining approach for healthcare application”, International
Decision tree Heart 79.062% Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,
Umair
6. Shafique et
Neural disease 80.402%
Vol/ 3 No. 1, 2012.
network
al., 2015
Naïve Bayes 82.914% [10] Srideivanai Nagarajan et al., “Design and Implementation of
K-means Clustering NA expert clinical system for diagnosing diabetes using data
Naïve Bayes Diabetes 0.989 mining techniques”, Indian Journal of Science and
Srideivanai
Technology, Vol 8(8), 771–776, April 2015.
7. Nagarajan et Random tree diagnose 0.975
al., 2015 CART 1 [11] Umair Shafique et al., “Data Mining in Healthcare for Heart
Logistic 1 Diseases”, International Journal of Innovation and Applied
Table1: Details of Literature survey Studies, ISSN 2028-9324 Vol. 10 No. 4 march 2015, pp.
1312-1322.
VIII. CONCLUSION

Data mining is a concept widely used in healthcare field. Data

mining techniques are popularly used in all the applications of
healthcare that include healthcare management, detection of
fraud and abuse, customer relationship management and
treatment effectiveness. In this survey, an outlines of data
mining definitions are discussed along with the challenges in
the field of healthcare. It is also noteworthy to elaborate on
data mining techniques and its application in healthcare.
The various works done by different researchers is
revisited.The prediction of diseases using Data Mining
applications is a challenging task but it drastically reduces the
human effort and increases the diagnostic accuracy.

REFERENCES
[2] Dheeraj Raju et al., “Exploring factors associated with
pressure ulcers: A data mining approach”, International
Journal of Nursing Studies 52 (2015) 102-111.

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