Classifications of Breast Cancer Diagnosis using Machine Learning

Abstract

Breast Cancer (BC) is amongst the most common and leading causes of deaths in women throughout the world. Recently, classification and data analysis tools are being widely used in the medical field for diagnosis, prognosis and decision making to help lower down the risks of people dying or suffering from diseases. Advanced machine learning methods have proven to give hope for patients as this has helped the doctors in early detection of diseases like Breast Cancer that can be fatal, in support with providing accurate outcomes. However, the results highly depend on the techniques used for feature selection and classification which will produce a strong machine learning model. In this paper, a performance comparison is conducted using four classifiers which are Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Random Forest on the Wisconsin Breast Cancer dataset to spot the most effective predictors. The main goal is to apply best machine learning classification methods to predict the Breast Cancer as benign or malignant using terms such as accuracy, f-measure, precision and recall. Experimental results show that Random forest is proven to achieve the highest accuracy of 99.26% on this dataset and features, while SVM and KNN show 97.78% and 97.04% accuracy respectively. MLP shows the least accuracy of 94.07%. All the experiments are conducted using RStudio as the data mining tool platform.