Using Subgroup Discovery to Relate Odor Pleasantness and Intensity to Peripheral Nervous System Reactions

Activation of the autonomic nervous system is a primary characteristic of human hedonic responses to sensory stimuli. For smells, general tendencies of physiological reactions have been described using classical statistics. However, these physiological variations are generally not quantified precisely; each psychophysiological parameter has very often been studied separately and individual variability was not systematically considered. The current study presents an innovative approach based on data mining, whose goal is to extract knowledge from a dataset. This approach uses a subgroup discovery algorithm which allows extraction of rules that apply to as many olfactory stimuli and individuals as possible. These rules are described by intervals on a set of physiological attributes. Results allowed both quantifying how each physiological parameter relates to odor pleasantness and perceived intensity but also describing the participation of each individual to these rules. This approach can be applied to other fields of affective sciences characterized by complex and heterogeneous datasets.