No abstract

Background: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) affects young adults and has great impact on the social, emotional and work spheres.

This paper describes the application of evolutionary fuzzy systems for subgroup discovery to a medical problem, the study on the type of patients who tend to visit the psychiatric emergency department in a given period of time of the day. In this problem, the objective is to characterise subgroups of patients according to their time of arrival at the emergency department. To solve this problem, several subgroup discovery algorithms have been applied to determine which of them obtains better results. The multiobjective evolutionary algorithm MESDIF for the extraction of fuzzy rules obtains better results and so it has been used to extract interesting information regarding the rate of admission to the psychiatric emergency department.