Erythemato-squamous diseases are a general designation of six common skin diseases, of which the differential diagnosis is a difficult problem in dermatology. This paper presents a new method based on virtual coding for qualitative variables and multinomial logistic regression penalized via elastic net. Considering the attributes of variables, a virtual coding is applied and contributes to avoid the irrationality of calculating nominal values directly. Multinomial logistic regression model penalized via elastic net is thence used to fit the correlation between the features and classification of diseases. At last, parameter estimations can be attained through coordinate descent. This method reached accuracy rate of 98.34%±0.0027% using 10-fold cross validation in the experiments. Our method attained equivalent accuracy rate compared to the results of other methods, but steps are simpler and stability is higher.
