Host: Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics (SOFT)
The importance of team medical treatment in which doctors and co-medical colleagues (i.e., nurse, pharmacist, CRC, and so on) treat cancer together has been increasing. The nurse's main roles are to help with the cancer therapy and provide mental support to patients and families. We surveyed the concerned nurse's involvement in the cancer therapy using a questionnaire. We asked them the need for palliative care, importance of team medical treatment, etc. The purpose of our analysis was to explore factors that influence the nurse while providing palliative care. Multiple linear regression analysis is one of the most popular methods for performing data analysis of questionnaires. However, it cannot construct a model with an interaction effect and nonlinear structure. We adopted the rule ensemble (RE) method (Friedman and Popescu, 2008) because it can model nonlinear and interaction structures. Furthermore, in the RE method, the estimated model can be interpreted based on rules (base learner). Moreover, we developed a new graphical diagnosis for supporting the result. Therefore, we provided some influence factors about the intention of the nurse during palliative care and illustrated them using a graphical representation.
