Fuzzy Characterization of Coronary Disease

The paper presents a methodology, based on Fuzzy Set Theory, to study the influence of social and psychological factors on the coronary disease. A life history questionnaire has been used to collect data from control subjects and coronary patients. The two groups (made homogeneous in respect to objective features like sex, age, job, etc.) have been used as training sets to learn the most relevant combinations of social and psychological features in the characterization of the coronary disease. Each of these features (like Stress, Social mobility, Hysteria, etc.) is represented by means of a fuzzy linguistic variable, whose membership value is evaluated on the basis of the answers to the questions relative to the particular feature.