Breast cancer detection: an effective comparison of different machine learning algorithms on the Wisconsin dataset

Abstract

According to the American cancer society, breast cancer is one of the leading causes of women's mortality worldwide. Early identification and treatment are the most effective approaches to halt the spread of this cancer. The objective of this article is to give a comparison of eight machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), decision tree (DT), ada boost (AB), support vector machine (SVM), gradient boosting (GB), and Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) for breast cancer detection. The breast cancer Wisconsin (diagnostic) dataset is being utilized to validate the findings of this study. The comparison was made using the following performance metrics: accuracy, sensitivity, false omission rate, specificity, false discovery rate and area under curve. The LR method achieved a maximum accuracy of 99.12% among all eight algorithms and was compared to other comparable studies in the literature. The five features chosen are used to calculate the model's fidelity-to-interpretability ratio (FIR), which indicates how much interpretability was sacrificed for performance. The uniqueness of this work is the explainability approach taken in the model's performance, which aims to make the model's outputs more understandable and interpretable to healthcare experts.