An adaptive weight search method based on the Grey wolf optimizer algorithm for skin lesion ensemble classification

Skin cancer is a common type of malignant tumor that poses a serious threat to patients' lives and health, especially melanoma. It may spread to other body parts, resulting in serious complications and death. In the medical field, accurate identification of skin lesion images is crucial for diagnosing different diseases. However, due to the similarity between different skin lesions, it brings some challenges to medical diagnosis. In this paper, a novel Ensemble Learning Model (EL‐DLOA) based on deep learning and optimization algorithms is proposed, which uses four different deep neural network architectures to generate confidence levels for classes, and optimization algorithms are used to integrate these confidence levels to make the final predictions. To ensure the model's accuracy and reliability, it is first trained using three different learning rates to find the best classification performance of the model. Then, a new search method based on the grey wolf optimization algorithm is proposed to enhance the grey wolf search efficiency. The method improves the search mechanism by changing the grey wolf's individual position through random perturbation or adaptive mutation, which solves the problem that the grey wolf algorithm is easy to fall into local optimum. Finally, four different ensemble strategies are used to reduce individual model bias in the classification process. The proposed model is trained and evaluated using the publicly available dataset HAM10000. The experimental results show that the improved grey wolf optimization algorithm effectively avoids the premature convergence problem and improves the search combination efficiency. Furthermore, in the ensemble methods, the adaptive weight average ensemble strategy effectively improves the classification performance, yielding accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.888, 0.837, 0.897, and 0.862, respectively. These metrics show varying degrees of improvement over the best performing single model. In general, the results indicate that the proposed method achieves high accuracy and practicality in skin lesion classification. Our model shows excellent performance in comparison with other existing models, which makes it significant for research and application in dermatology diagnosis.