Learning Optimized Or's of And's
This work provides an incremental improvement in interpretable machine learning, specifically for medical diagnostics like sleep apnea screening.
The authors tackled the problem of constructing interpretable Or's of And's models for machine learning by developing two optimization-based frameworks, OOA and OOAx, and applied them to diagnostic screening for obstructive sleep apnea, achieving high accuracy with improved interpretability.
Or's of And's (OA) models are comprised of a small number of disjunctions of conjunctions, also called disjunctive normal form. An example of an OA model is as follows: If ($x_1 = $ `blue' AND $x_2=$ `middle') OR ($x_1 = $ `yellow'), then predict $Y=1$, else predict $Y=0$. Or's of And's models have the advantage of being interpretable to human experts, since they are a set of conditions that concisely capture the characteristics of a specific subset of data. We present two optimization-based machine learning frameworks for constructing OA models, Optimized OA (OOA) and its faster version, Optimized OA with Approximations (OOAx). We prove theoretical bounds on the properties of patterns in an OA model. We build OA models as a diagnostic screening tool for obstructive sleep apnea, that achieves high accuracy with a substantial gain in interpretability over other methods.