Benchmarking prognosis methods for survivability - A case study for patients with contingent primary cancers

Abstract

Background: There is an increasing number of patients with a first primary cancer who are diagnosed with a second primary cancer, but prognosis methods to predict the survivability of a patient with multiple primary cancers have not been fully benchmarked.

Methods: This study investigated the five-year survivability prognosis performances of six machine learning approaches. These approaches are: artificial neural network, decision tree (DT), logistic regression, support vector machine, naïve Bayes (NB), and Bayesian network (BN). A synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) was used to solve the imbalanced problem, and a nationwide cancer patient database containing 7,845 subjects in Taiwan was used as a sample source. Ten primary and secondary cancers and their key variables affecting the survivability of the patients were identified.

Results: All the models using SMOTE improved sensitivity and specificity significantly. NB has the highest performance in terms of accuracy and specificity, whereas BN has the highest performance in terms of sensitivity. Further, the computational time and the power of knowledge representation of NB, BN, and DT outperformed the others.

Conclusions: Selecting the appropriate prognosis models to predict survivability of patients with two contingent primary cancers can aid precise prediction and can support appropriate treatment advice.

Keywords: Artificial neural network; Bayesian network; Cancer; Decision tree; Logistic regression; Over-sampling technique; Support vector machine; Survivability prognosis.