Gaussian-Stacking Multiclassifiers for Human Embryo Selection
Dinora A. Morales, Endika Bengoetxea, Pedro Larrañaga · IGI Global eBooks · 2009
Infertility is currently considered an important social problem that has been subject to special interest by medical doctors and biologists. Due to ethical reasons, different legislative restrictions apply in every country on human assisted reproduction techniques such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF). An essential problem in human assisted reproduction is the selection of suitable embryos to transfer in a patient, for which the application of artificial intelligence as well as data mining techniques can be helpful as decision-support systems. In this chapter we introduce a new multi-classification system using Gaussian networks to combine the outputs (probability distributions) of standard machine learning classification algorithms. Our method proposes to consider these outputs as inputs for a superior-level and to apply a stacking scheme to provide a meta-level classification result. We provide a proof of the validity of the approach by employing this multi-classification technique to a complex real medical problem: The selection of the most promising embryo-batch for human in-vitro fertilization treatments.