Biological data mining with neural networks: implementation and application of a flexible decision tree extraction algorithm to genomic problem domains

In the past, neural networks have been viewed as classification and regression systems whose internal representations were extremely difficult to interpret. It is now becoming apparent that algorithms can be designed which extract understandable representations from trained neural networks, enabling them to be used for data mining, i.e. the discovery and explanation of previously unknown relationships present in data. This paper reviews existing algorithms for extracting comprehensible representations from neural networks and describes research to generalize and extend the capabilities of one of these algorithms. The algorithm has been generalized for application to bioinformatics datasets, including the prediction of splice site junctions in Human DNA sequences. Results generated on this datasets are compared with those generated by a conventional data mining technique (C5) and conclusions drawn.