Accurate diagnostic detection of the cancerous cells in a patient is critical and may alter the subsequent treatment and increase the chances of survival rate. Machine learning techniques have been instrumental in disease detection and are currently being used in various classification problems due to their accurate prediction performance. Various techniques may provide different desired accuracies and it is therefore imperative to use the most suitable method which provides the best desired results. This research seeks to provide comparative analysis of Support Vector Machine, Bayesian classifier and otherArtificial neural network classifiers (Backpropagation, linear programming, Learning vector quantization, and K nearest neighborhood) on the Wisconsin breast cancer classification problem.

Purpose Emergency departments (ED) are faced with the challenge of capacity planning that caused by the high demand for patients and limited resources. Consequently, inadequate resources lead to increased delays, impacts on the quality of care and increase the health-care costs. Such circumstances necessitate utilizing operational research modules, such as the Markov decision process (MDP) to enable better decision-making. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability and usage of MDP on ED. Design/methodology/approach The adoption of MDP provides invaluable insights into system operations based on the different system states (e.g. very busy to unoccupied) to ensure optimal assigning of resources and reduced costs. In this paper, a descriptive health system model based on the MDP is presented, and a numerical example is illustrated to elaborate its appropriateness in optimal policy decision determination. Findings Faced with numerous decisions, hospital managers have to ensure that the appropriate technique is used to minimize any undesired outcomes. MDP has been shown to be a robust approach which provides support to the critical decision-making processes. Additionally, MDP also provides insights on the associated costs which enable the hospital managers to efficiently allocate resources ensuring quality health care and increased throughput while minimizing costs. Originality/value Applying MDP in the ED is a unique and good starting. MDP is powerful tool helps in making a decision in the critical situations, and the ED needs such tool.

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