Breast cancer prediction model with decision tree and adaptive boosting

Abstract

In this study, breast cancer prediction model is proposed with decision tree and adaptive boosting (Adboost). Furthermore, an extensive experimental evaluation of the predictive performance of the proposed model is conducted. The study is conducted on breast cancer dataset collected form the kaggle data repository. The dataset consists of 569 observations of which the 212 or 37.25% are benign or breast cancer negative and 62.74% are malignant or breast cancer positive. The class distribution shows that, the dataset is highly imbalanced and a learning algorithm such as decision tree is biased to the benign observation and results in poor performance on predicting the malignant observation. To improve the performance of the decision tree on the malignant observation, boosting algorithm namely, the adaptive boosting is employed. Finally, the predictive performance of the decision tree and adaptive boosting is analyzed. The analysis on predictive performance of the model on the kaggle breast cancer data repository shows that, adaptive boosting has 92.53% accuracy and the accuracy of decision tree is 88.80%, Overall, the adaboost algorithm performed better than decision tree.