Empirical Performance Analysis of Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine based Classifiers on Biological Databases

Abstract

The classification and prediction of medical diseases is a cutting edge research problem in the medical field. The experts of machine learning are continuously proposing new classification methods for the prediction of diseases. The discovery of classification rules from medical databases for classification and prediction of diseases is a challenging and nontrivial task. It is very significant to investigate the more promising and efficient classification approaches for the discovery of classification rules from the medical databases. This paper focuses on the problem of selection of more efficient, promising and suitable classifier for the prediction of specific diseases by performing empirical studies on bunch mark medical databases. The research work under the focus concentrates on the benchmark medical data sets i.e. arrhythmia, breast-cancer, diabetes, hepatitis, mammography, lymph, liver-disorders, sick, cardiotocography, heart-statlog, breast-w, and lung-cancer. The medical data sets are obtained from the open-source UCI machine learning repository. The research work will be investigating the performance of Decision Tree (i.e. AdaBoost.NC, C45-C, CART, and ID3-C) and Support Vector Machines. For experimentation, Knowledge Extraction based on Evolutionary Learning (KEEL), a data mining tool will be used. This research work provides the empirical performance analysis of decision tree-based classifiers and SVM on a specific dataset. Moreover, this article provides a comparative performance analysis of classification approaches in terms of statistics.