Deviation-support based fuzzy ensemble of multi-modal deep learning classifiers for breast cancer prognosis prediction

Abstract

Breast cancer is the fifth leading cause of death in females worldwide. Early detection and treatment are crucial for improving health outcomes and preventing more serious conditions. Analyzing diverse information from multiple sources without errors, particularly with the growing burden of cancer cases, is a daunting task for humans. In this study, our main objective is to improve the accuracy of breast cancer survival prediction using a novel ensemble approach. It is novel due to the consideration of deviation (closeness between predicted classes and actual classes) and support (sparsity between predicted classes and actual classes) of the predicted class with respect to the actual class, a feature lacking in traditional ensembles. The ensemble uses fuzzy integrals on support and deviation scores from base classifiers to calculate aggregated scores while considering how confident or uncertain each classifier is. The proposed ensemble mechanism has been evaluated on a multi-modal breast cancer dataset of breast tumors collected from participants in the METABRIC trial. The proposed architecture proves its efficiency by achieving the accuracy, sensitivity, F1-score, and balanced accuracy of 82.88%, 58.64%, 62.94%, and 74.75% respectively. The obtained results are superior to the performance of individual classifiers and existing ensemble approaches.