Introduction
Breast cancer (BC) is one of the most common cancers among women worldwide, representing the majority of new cancer cases and cancer-related deaths according to global statistics, making it a significant public health problem in today’s society. The early diagnosis of BC can improve the prognosis and chance of survival significantly, as it can promote timely clinical treatment to patients. Further accurate classification of benign tumors can prevent patients undergoing unnecessary treatments. Thus, the correct diagnosis of BC and classification of patients into malignant or benign groups is the subject of much research. Because of its unique advantages in critical features detection from complex BC datasets, machine learning (ML) is widely recognized as the methodology of choice in BC pattern classification and forecast modelling. Classification and data mining methods are an effective way to classify data. Especially in medical field, where those methods are widely used in diagnosis and analysis to make decisions.
The goal is to classify whether the breast cancer is benign or malignant. To achieve this I have used an ensemble of SVM, Random forest and XGBoost to learn from the training data.
Features are computed from a digitized image of a fine needle aspirate (FNA) of a breast mass. They describe characteristics of the cell nuclei present in the image. A few of the images can be found at [Web Link]
Separating plane described above was obtained using Multisurface Method-Tree (MSM-T) [K. P. Bennett, "Decision Tree Construction Via Linear Programming." Proceedings of the 4th Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Society, pp. 97-101, 1992], a classification method which uses linear programming to construct a decision tree. Relevant features were selected using an exhaustive search in the space of 1-4 features and 1-3 separating planes.
The actual linear program used to obtain the separating plane in the 3-dimensional space is that described in: [K. P. Bennett and O. L. Mangasarian: "Robust Linear Programming Discrimination of Two Linearly Inseparable Sets", Optimization Methods and Software 1, 1992, 23-34].
This database is also available through the UW CS ftp server:https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Breast+Cancer+Wisconsin+(Diagnostic)
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ID number
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Diagnosis (M = malignant, B = benign)
3-32)Ten real-valued features are computed for each cell nucleus:
a) radius (mean of distances from center to points on the perimeter)
b) texture (standard deviation of gray-scale values)
c) perimeter
d) area
e) smoothness (local variation in radius lengths)
f) compactness (perimeter^2 / area - 1.0)
g) concavity (severity of concave portions of the contour)
h) concave points (number of concave portions of the contour)
i) symmetry
j) fractal dimension ("coastline approximation" - 1)
Mean Accuracy : 0.9762340036563071