A mixture of views network with applications to the classification of breast microcalcifications

In this paper we examine data fusion methods for multi-view data classification. We present a decision concept which explicitly takes into account the input multi-view structure, where for each case there is a different subset of relevant views. The proposed method, which we dub Mixture of Views, is implemented by a special purpose neural network architecture. It is demonstrated on the task of classifying breast microcalcifications as benign or malignant based on several mammography views. The single view decisions are combined by a data-driven decision, according to the relevance of each view in a given case, into a global decision. The method is evaluated on a large multi-view dataset extracted from the standardized digital database for screening mammography (DDSM). The experimental results show that our method outperforms previously suggested fusion methods.