Improved Age Estimation Mechanism from Medical Data Based on Deep Instance Weighting Fusion

Abstract

Age estimation is very useful in the fields of pattern recognition and data mining, especially for medical problems. The current methods of age estimation do not consider the relationships among instances, especially the internal hierarchical structure, which limits the potential improvement of the age estimation error. A deep age estimation mechanism based on deep instance weighting fusion is proposed to solve this problem. First, an iterative means clustering (IMC) algorithm is designed to construct the hierarchical instance space (multiplelayer instance space) and obtain multiple trained regression models. Second, a deep instance weighting fusion (DIWF) mechanism is designed to fuse the results from the trained regression models to produce the final results. The experimental results show that the mean absolute error (MAE) of the estimated ages can be decreased significantly on two publicly available data sets, with relative gains of 4.97% and 0.8% on the Heart Disease Data Set and Diabetes Mellitus Data Set, respectively. Additionally, some factors that may influence the performance of the proposed mechanism are studied. In general, the proposed age estimation mechanism is effective. In addition, the mechanism is not a concrete algorithm but framework algorithm (or mechanism), and can be used to generate various concrete age estimation algorithms, so the mechanism is helpful for related studies.