Data Mining, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 1

What’s It All About?

Human in vitro fertilization involves collecting several eggs from a woman’s ovaries, which, after fertilization with partner or donor sperm, produce several embryos. Some of these are selected and transferred to the woman’s uterus. The challenge is to select the “best” embryos to use—the ones that are most likely to survive. Selection is based on around 60 recorded features of the embryos—characterizing their morphology, oocyte, and follicle, and the sperm sample. The number of features is large enough to make it difficult for an embryologist to assess them all simultaneously and correlate historical data with the crucial outcome of whether that embryo did or did not result in a live child. In a research project ...