Using Pearson Correlation and Mutual Information (PC-MI) to Select Features for Accurate Breast Cancer Diagnosis Based on a Soft Voting Classifier

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the most critical diseases suffered by many people around the world, making it the most common medical risk they will face. This disease is considered the leading cause of death around the world, and early detection is difficult. In the field of healthcare, where early diagnosis based on machine learning (ML) helps save patients’ lives from the risks of diseases, better-performing diagnostic procedures are crucial. ML models have been used to improve the effectiveness of early diagnosis. In this paper, we proposed a new feature selection method that combines two filter methods, Pearson correlation and mutual information (PC-MI), to analyse the correlation amongst features and then select important features before passing them to a classification model. Our method is capable of early breast cancer prediction and depends on a soft voting classifier that combines a certain set of ML models (decision tree, logistic regression and support vector machine) to produce one model that carries the strengths of the models that have been combined, yielding the best prediction accuracy. Our work is evaluated by using the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer datasets. The proposed methodology outperforms previous work, achieving 99.3% accuracy, an F1 score of 0.9922, a recall of 0.9846, a precision of 1 and an AUC of 0.9923. Furthermore, the accuracy of 10-fold cross-validation is 98.2%.