Knowledge discovery from a breast cancer database

Abstract

We report on the use of various Machine Learning algorithms on an electronic database of breast cancer patients. The task was to predict breast cancer recurrence using a short subset of clinical attributes such as tumor presence, tumor size, invasive nature of tumor, number of lymph nodes involved, severity of lymphedema and stage of tumor. The predictive accuracy over fifty runs employing test sets not used to build the model were 63.4%(Cart), 63.9%(C45), 62.5%(C45rules), 66.4%(FOCL) and 68.3%(Naive Bayes). An extension of the model using additional features and larger datasets is contemplated.