Breast Cancer Prediction and Classification Using Supervised Learning Techniques

Abstract

Approximately 2.1 million women every year are affected due to breast cancer which has become one of the major causes for cancer related deaths among women. World Health Organization’s (WHO) report 2018, reveals that around 15% of deaths among women are due to breast cancer. Lack of awareness is one of the major reason which has led to the detection of breast cancer at the later stage. Another major reason is access to limited health resources which make the problem worse. Early or timely detection of breast cancer is utmost important to increase the survival rate of the patients. World Health Organization’s (WHO) cancer awareness guidelines recommend that women aged between 40–49 years of age or 70–75 years of age must be subjected to mammographic screening which will provide the timely detection of the problem, if it persist. This article uses Breast Cancer dataset from UCI machine learning repository to predict and diagnose the class of breast cancer: benign or malignant by using supervised learning. Supervised machine learning algorithms: KNearest Neighbor (K-NN), Naive Bayes, logistic regression and decision tree have been utilized for breast cancer prediction. The performance evaluation of these classification algorithms is done based on various performance measures: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and F -measure.