The Performance of K-Nearest Neighbors on Malignant and Benign Classes: Sensitivity, Specificity, and Accuracy Analysis for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Abstract

Breast cancer represents one of the diseases that make a high number of deaths every year. It is the most common type of all cancers and the main cause of women's deaths worldwide. Classification and data mining methods are an effective way to classify data. Especially in medical field, where those methods are widely used in diagnosis and analysis to make decisions. In this paper, a performance comparison between different machine learning algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (C4.5), Naive Bayes (NB) and k Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) on the Wisconsin Breast Cancer (original) datasets is conducted. The main objective is to assess the correctness in classifying data with respect to efficiency and effectiveness of each algorithm in terms of accuracy, precision, sensitivity and specificity. Experimental results show that SVM gives the highest accuracy (97.13%) with lowest error rate. All experiments are executed within a simulation environment and conducted in WEKA data mining tool.