A Dataset Centric Feature Selection and Stacked Model to Detect Breast Cancer

Abstract

World Health Organisation declared breast cancer (BC) as the most frequent suffering among women and accounted for 15 percent of all cancer deaths. Its accurate prediction is of utmost significance as it not only prevents deaths but also stops mistreatments. The conventional way of diagnosis includes the estimation of the tumor size as a sign of plausible cancer. Machine learning (ML) techniques have shown the effectiveness of predicting disease. However, the ML methods have been method centric rather than being dataset centric. In this paper, the authors introduce a dataset centric approach(DCA) deploying a genetic algorithm (GA) method to identify the features and a learning ensemble classifier algorithm to predict using the right features. Adaboost is such an approach that trains the model assigning weights to individual records rather than experimenting on the splitting of datasets alone and perform hyper-parameter optimization. The authors simulate the results by varying base classifiers i.e, using logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), naive bayes (NB), random forest (RF), and 10-fold cross-validations with a different split of the dataset as training and testing. The proposed DCA model with RF and 10-fold cross-validations demonstrated its potential with almost 100% performance in the classification results that no research could suggest so far. The DCA satisfies the underlying principles of data mining: the principle of parsimony, the principle of inclusion, the principle of discrimination, and the principle of optimality. This DCA is a democratic and unbiased ensemble approach as it allows all features and methods in the start to compete, but filters out the most reliable chain (of steps and combinations) that give the highest accuracy. With fewer characteristics and splits of 50-50, 66-34, and 10 fold cross-validations, the Stacked model achieves 97 % accuracy. These values and the reduction of features improve upon prior research works. Further, the proposed classifier is compared with some state-of-the-art machine-learning classifiers, namely random forest, naive Bayes, support-vector machine with radial basis function kernel, and decision tree. For testing the classifiers, different performance metrics have been employed – accuracy, detection rate, sensitivity, specificity, receiver operating characteristic, area under the curve, and some statistical tests such as the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and kappa statistics – to check the strength of the proposed DCA classifier. Various splits of training and testing data – namely, 50–50%, 66–34%, 80–20% and 10-fold cross-validation – have been incorporated in this research to test the credibility of the classification models in handling the unbalanced data. Finally, the proposed DCA model demonstrated its potential with almost 100% performance in the classification results. The output results have also been compared with other research on the same dataset where the proposed classifiers were found to be best across all the performance dimensions.