Objective: Cervical cancer stands as a leading cause of mortality among women in developing nations. To ensure the reduction of its adverse consequences, the primary protocols to be adhered to involve early detection and treatment under the guidance of expert medical professionals. An effective approach for identifying this form of malignancy involves the examination of Pap smear images. However, in the context of automating cervical cancer detection, many of the existing datasets frequently exhibit missing data points, a factor that can substantially impact the effectiveness of machine learning models.
Methods: In response to these hurdles, this research introduces an automated system designed to predict cervical cancer with a dual focus: adeptly managing missing data while attaining remarkable accuracy. The system's core is built upon a stacked ensemble voting classifier model, which amalgamates three distinct machine learning models, all harmoniously integrated with the KNN Imputer to address the issue of missing values.
Results: The model put forth attains an accuracy of 99.41%, precision of 97.63%, recall of 95.96%, and an F1 score of 96.76% when incorporating the KNN imputation method. The investigation conducts a comparative analysis, contrasting the performance of this model with seven alternative machine learning algorithms in two scenarios: one where missing values are eliminated, and another employing KNN imputation. This study offers validation of the effectiveness of the proposed model in comparison to current state-of-the-art methodologies.
Conclusions: This research delves into the challenge of handling missing data in the dataset utilized for cervical cancer detection. The findings have the potential to assist healthcare professionals in achieving early detection and enhancing the quality of care provided to individuals affected by cervical cancer.
Keywords: Cervical cancer detection; K nearest neighbor imputer; ensemble learning; healthcare; missing values.
© The Author(s) 2023.