Quantum Learning of Fuzzy Cognitive Map: An Illustrative Study of Cirrhosis

Autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) is an inflammatory liver disease with an undiscovered cause that is attributed to the promiscuous humoral as well as cellular immune response against homologous self-antigens. If AIH is not diagnosed and treated in its early stages, it can result in cirrhosis or liver failure. In this regard, we propose a novel algorithm based on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) for paving the way for accurate diagnosis of it. For doing so, major and innate characteristics of AIH which play a significant role in diagnosing it, in addition to the data of 216 samples—suffering from AIH—have been gathered by the help of three pathologists. Then, we have applied our developed FCM solution on obtained data in order to classify them in one the definite AIH or improbable AIH classes. Our devised algorithm utilizes quantum inspired evolutionary algorithm (QEA) as a link reduction tool as well as particle swarm optimization algorithm as a link tuning mean. In the QEA, instead of coding the presence and absence of links between concepts with 1 and 0, respectively, the probability of their existence or inexistence is modeled with a Q-bit (the smallest information unit in the QEA) and, depending on the outcome of objective function, the quantum state of these Q-bits are updated. Using a probabilistic representation instead of 0 and 1, in addition to creating diversity in the solution space, can lead to escapes from many local optima; which is an issue of concern in the optimization of FCM structure. Experimental results show that not only does our developed algorithm make accurate diagnosis, but it outperforms other conventional methods as well.