Predictive modeling for breast cancer based on machine learning algorithms and features selection methods

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death among women worldwide. However, early prediction of breast cancer plays a crucial role. Therefore, strong needs exist for automatic accurate early prediction of breast cancer. In this paper, machine learning (ML) classifiers combined with features selection methods are used to build an intelligent tool for breast cancer prediction. The Wisconsin diagnostic breast cancer (WDBC) dataset is used to train and test the model. Classification algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM), random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and naïve Bayes, were employed. Performance measures for each of them were obtained, namely: accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, Kappa, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and time. The results indicate that without feature selection, LightGBM achieves the highest accuracy at 95%. With minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) feature selection (15 features), LightGBM outperforms other classifiers, achieving an accuracy of 98%. For Pearson correlation coefficient feature selection (15 features), LightGBM also excels with a 95% accuracy rate. Lasso feature selection (5 features) produces varied results across classifiers, with logistic regression achieving the highest accuracy at 96%. These findings underscore the importance of feature selection in refining model performance and in improving detection for breast cancer.