A framework for predicting breast cancer recurrence

Breast cancer is one of the serious diseases that threaten the life of many women worldwide. The seriousness of this disease is that it is often discovered in late stages after a period of its occurrence. This causes a wide spread of the disease and difficulty in its treatment. Another important characteristic of this disease is that it can return again after a period of its treatment. Therefore, predicting the occurrence or recurrence of such disease early is the best solution to have a high cure rate. The main objective of this paper is to improve the prediction performance of the breast cancer recurrence. Many methods have been proposed to predict breast cancer recurrence. However, these methods did not achieve the desired results on one of the most famous datasets in the field of breast cancer recurrence's prediction (i.e., Wisconsin Prognosis Breast Cancer (WPBC) dataset). The highest accuracy achieved using the previous methods is 89.89%. Therefore, this paper provides a framework for improving the prediction of breast cancer recurrence. The proposed framework has the ability to overcome many of the challenges in the existing dataset such as: (a) the problem of imbalance between classes using a data over -sampling technique; and (b) the large number of data dimensions using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and a wrapper dimensionality reduction technique based on Genetic Algorithm (GA). It also uses the neural network algorithm to fuse the results of two individual classifiers (i.e., Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM)). Our proposed framework evaluation showed a significant improvement in the predication performance. It achieved an accuracy of 98.3%, area under the curve of 99%, and precision, recall, and f1-measure of 98%.

Automated summary

Breast cancer is a serious disease that poses a threat to the lives of women worldwide. Early prediction of its occurrence or recurrence is crucial for improving the cure rate. This paper proposes a framework for improving the prediction of breast cancer recurrence and achieves significant improvements in prediction performance.