Comparing Data Mining Algorithms for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Background: Early screening and diagnosis of breast cancer (BC) is critical for improving the quality of care and reducing the mortality rate. Objectives: This study aimed to construct and compare the performance of several machine learning (ML) algorithms in predicting BC. Methods: This descriptive and applied study included 1,052 samples (442 BC and 710 non-BC) with 30 features related to positive and negative BC diagnoses. The data mining (DM) process was implemented using the selected algorithm, including J-48 and random forest (RF) decision tree (DT), multilayer perceptron (MLP), Naïve Bayes (NB), Adaboost (AB), and logistics regression (LR) classifier. Then, we obtained the best algorithm by comparing their performances using the confusion matrix and area under the receiver operator characteristics (ROC) curve (AUC). Finally, we adopted the best model for BC prognosis. Results: The results of evaluating various DM algorithms revealed that the J-48 DT algorithm had the best performance (AUC = 0.922), followed by the AB, MLP, LR, and RF algorithms (AUC: 0.899, 0819, 0.716, and 0.703, respectively). Also, the NB algorithm achieved the lowest performance in this regard (AUC = 0.669). Conclusions: The ML presents a reasonable level of accuracy for an early diagnosis and screening of breast malignancies. Also, the empirical results showed that the J-48 DT algorithm yielded higher performance than other classifiers.