Selective sampling to overcome skewed a priori probabilities with neural networks

Highly skewed a priori probabilities present challenges for researchers developing medical decision aids due to a lack of information on the rare outcome of interest. This paper attempts to overcome this obstacle by artificially increasing the mortality rate of the training sets. A weight pruning technique called weight-elimination is also applied to this coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) database to assess its impact on the artificial neural network's (ANN) performance. The results showed that increasing the mortality rate improved the sensitivity rates at the cost of the other performance measures, and the weight-elimination cost function improved the sensitivity rate without seriously affecting the other performance measures.