An enhancement in cancer classification accuracy using a two-step feature selection method based on artificial neural networks with 15 neurons

Abstract

An artificial neural network (ANN) is a tool that can be utilized to recognize cancer effectively. Nowadays, the risk of cancer is increasing dramatically all over the world. Detecting cancer is very difficult due to a lack of data. Proper data are essential for detecting cancer accurately. Cancer classification has been carried out by many researchers, but there is still a need to improve classification accuracy. For this purpose, in this research, a two-step feature selection (FS) technique with a 15-neuron neural network (NN), which classifies cancer with high accuracy, is proposed. The FS method is utilized to reduce feature attributes, and the 15-neuron network is utilized to classify the cancer. This research utilized the benchmarkWisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset to compare the proposed method with other existing techniques, showing a significant improvement of up to 99.4% in classification accuracy. The results produced in this research are more promising and significant than those in existing papers.