A hybrid breast cancer classification algorithm based on meta-learning and artificial neural networks

Abstract

The incidence of breast cancer in women has surpassed that of lung cancer as the world's leading new cancer case. Regular screening and measures become an effective way to prevent breast cancer and also provide a good foundation for later treatment. Women should receive regular checkups in the hospital after reaching a certain age. The use of computer-aided technology can improve the accuracy and efficiency of physicians' decision-making. Data pre-processing is required before data analysis, and 16 features are selected using a correlation-based feature selection method. In this paper, meta-learning and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are combined to create a hybrid algorithm. The proposed hybrid algorithm for predicting breast cancer was attempted to achieve 98.74% accuracy and 98.02% F1-score by creating a combination of various meta-learning models whose output was used as input features for creating ANN models. Therefore, the hybrid algorithm proposed in this paper can obtain better prediction results than a single model.

Keywords: ANN; breast cancer; feature selection; machine learning algorithm; meta-learning.