Classification of Masses in Digital Mammograms Using the Genetic Ensemble Method

Abstract

Abstract All over the world, breast cancer is the second leading cause of death in women above 40 years of age. To design an efficient classification system for breast cancer diagnosis, one has to use efficient algorithms for feature selection to reduce the feature space of mammogram classification. The current work investigates the use of hybrid genetic ensemble method for feature selection and classification of masses. Genetic algorithm (GA) is used to select a subset of features and to evaluate the fitness of the selected features, Adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) and Random Forest (RF) ensembles with 10-fold cross-validation are employed. The selected features are used to classify masses into benign or malignant using AdaBoost, RF, and single Decision Tree (DT) classifiers. The performance evaluation of classifiers indicates that AdaBoost outperforms both RF and single DT classifiers. AdaBoost achieves an accuracy of 96.15%, with 97.32% sensitivity, 95.90% specificity, and area under curve of AZ = 0.982 ± 0.004. The results obtained with the proposed method are better when compared with extant research work.