Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Wrapper-Based Feature Selection and Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Breast cancer is commonest type of cancers among women. Early diagnosis plays a significant role in reducing the fatality rate. The main objective of this study is to propose an efficient approach to classify breast cancer tumor into either benign or malignant based on digitized image of a fine needle aspirate (FNA) of a breast mass represented by the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset. Two wrapper-based feature selection methods, namely, sequential forward selection(SFS) and sequential backward selection (SBS) are used to identify the most discriminant features which can contribute to improve the classification performance. The feed forward neural network (FFNN) is used as a classification algorithm. The learning algorithm hyper-parameters are optimized using the grid search process. After selecting the optimal classification model, the data is divided into training set and testing set and the performance was evaluated. The feature space is reduced from nine feature to seven and six features using SFS and SBS respectively. The highest classification accuracy recorded was 99.03% with FFNN using the seven SFS selected features. While accuracy recorded with the six SBS selected features was 98.54%. The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach is effective in terms of feature space reduction leading to better accuracy and efficient classification model.