Breast cancer (BC) is one of the most common cancers among women worldwide, representing the majority of new cancer cases and cancer-related deaths according to global statistics, making it a significant public health problem in today’s society.

The early diagnosis of BC can improve the prognosis and chance of survival significantly, as it can promote timely clinical treatment to patients. Further accurate classification of benign tumors can prevent patients undergoing unnecessary treatments. Thus, the correct diagnosis of BC and classification of patients into malignant or benign groups is the subject of much research. Because of its unique advantages in critical features detection from complex BC datasets, machine learning (ML) is widely recognized as the methodology of choice in BC pattern classification and forecast modelling.

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.

We will use the UCI Machine Learning Repository for breast cancer dataset.

1. ID number 2) Diagnosis (M = malignant, B = benign) 3–32)

1. radius (mean of distances from center to points on the perimeter)
2. texture (standard deviation of gray-scale values)
3. perimeter
4. area
5. smoothness (local variation in radius lengths)
6. compactness (perimeter^2 / area - 1.0)
7. concavity (severity of concave portions of the contour)
8. concave points (number of concave portions of the contour)
9. symmetry
10. fractal dimension ("coastline approximation" - 1)

The mean, standard error and "worst" or largest (mean of the three largest values) of these features were computed for each image, resulting in 30 features. For instance, field 3 is Mean Radius, field 13 is Radius SE, field 23 is Worst Radius.

All feature values are recoded with four significant digits.

Missing attribute values: none

Class distribution: 357 benign, 212 malignant

Training data accuracy - 97.8%

Testing data accuracy - 97.36%

Link to my Kaggle Notebook - Breast Cancer - 5 Classification Algorithms