Extracting rules from pruned neural networks for breast cancer diagnosis

A new algorithm for neural network pruning is presented. Using this algorithm, networks with small number of connections and high accuracy rates for breast cancer diagnosis are obtained. We will then describe how rules can be extracted from a pruned network by considering only a finite number of hidden unit activation values. The accuracy of the extracted rules is as high as the accuracy of the pruned network. For the breast cancer diagnosis problem, the concise rules extracted from the network achieve an accuracy rate of more than 95% on the training data set and on the test data set.