Vol 01, Issue 02, December 2012 International Journal of Data Mining Techniques and Applications http://iirpublications.com ISSN: 2278-2419 Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) 73 A STATISTICAL DECISION MAKING APPROACH FOR DISEASE DIAGNOSIS ABSTRACT Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence is a natural outgrowth of the intersection of Computer Science and Statistics. Disease diagnosis is one of its well known applications. This paper focuses on diagnosing diseases in human beings by analyzing their tongue using decision tree classifiers algorithm. Data collection is performed by manual methods. The ultimate aim is to track some common diseases by analyzing the basic tongue. Keywords: Machine Learning, Classification, Decision Trees, Disease Diagnosis, Tongue Analysis. 1. INTRODUCTION Machine learning offers a principled approach for developing sophisticated, automatic, and objective algorithms for analysis of high- dimensional and multimodal biomedical data. Machine learning and Formal Language theory are the two key aspects of Theoretical computer science and they are one among rapidly progressing fields of Computer Science. It is a natural outgrowth of the intersection of Computer Science and Statistics. It is nothing but programming computers to optimize a performance criterion using example, data or from past experience. As a broad subfield of Artificial Intelligence, it is concerned with the development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to learn. Machine learning has a wide spectrum of applications including Natural Language Processing, Syntactic Pattern Recognition, Image Processing, fraud detection, Medical Diagnosis [2,3,4], Bio- informatics, Game Playing, Robot Automation, Computer Vision, and Software Engineering, Density estimation in Statistics, Data Mining, and Clustering and so on. 2. TONGUE DIAGNOSIS Tongue diagnosis is an external observation of internal processes and an indispensable guide in differentiating syndromes. The tongue body color always reflects the true condition of the patient and its appearance monitors the improvement or decline of the patient’s condition. There is always an inter- relationship between the external part of the body such as face, tongue and the internal organs. This paper focuses on human tongue for detecting and diagnosing diseases. Moreover, inspection of tongue can also give accurate diagnosis results. One of the challenges in tongue diagnosis is the identification of important tongue properties, which can then be used for classification purpose in order for identifying possible diseases. There are two important characteristics of tongue in which the physicians are interested during examining. They are tongue substance and coating of the tongue. Tongue substance includes body, shape and movement. Tongue coating includes color of coating, thickness of coating, degree of wetness, appearance such as exfoliation, distribution, etc. 2.1. Tongue Basic Identification & Inspection: The tongue is a muscular organ situated in the floor of the mouth. It is associated with the functions of taste, speech, mastication and deglutition. It has an oral part that lies in the mouth and a pharyngeal part that lies in the P. Julia Grace Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science JBAS College for Women, Chennai. juliajesudas@gmail.com G. Jeyakumar Associate Professor Department of Mathematics St. Johns College, Palayamkottai