International Journal of Inventions in Computer Science and Engineering, Volume 6 Issue 5-7 May-July 2019

ANALYSIS OF MACHINE LEARNING APPROACHES TO DETECT AND

CLASSIFY BREAST CANCER

M. Lakshmitha1, A. Abdul Hayum2

1
M.E. VLSI Design, Akshaya College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore
2
Assistant Professor, Department of ECE, Akshaya College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore

ABSTRACT: The breast cancer is the most threatening and lethal disease among women and its more prevalent in the
developed countries. From the report of World Health Organization (WHO) it has been described that as of 2015 there
are about 2.1 million women were diagnosed with benign and malignant breast cancers. On an average out of 268,600
women diagnosed with cancer, about 41,760 deaths were reported. Record of various Oncologists show that early
detection of tumour can increase the survival rate of the patients. Though cancer diagnosis is done initially by experts in
radiology it is not always accurate. In the modern era new technologies such as mammography, Computerized
Tomography, Breast MRI and computer- aided detection (CAD) mammogram are used in the diagnosis procedure. But
because of the false-positive and false- negative values from the CAD report it becomes mandatory to improve the
efficiency of the system. The efficiency of the algorithm depends on the type of data and the quality of data images
employed in the process Machine Learning plays a vital role in detecting cancer by processing the mammogram images.
This paper presents different technologies and their limitations in detection and classification of the breast cancer images.
Keywords: Breast Cancer, CART , KNN , NB, RF, SVM,

I. INTRODUCTION False-Negative is a chance where a 10% probability of

tumour is present but it is not detected.
Cancer begins when normal healthy cells grow
tremendously without any control forming a huge mass
called the tumour. This tumour may be cancerous or Generally mammography is done to identify some
benign. Cancerous tumours is more deadly and named important abnormalities in the breast such as
malignant when it spreads to other parts of the body and  Asymmetries – the improper regions of breast
the lymph nodes. Benign tumour grows nut it does not with varying densities
spread over the body. Cancers are categorized into 5  Clusters of small calcifications
stages from Stage 0 to Stage IV. When the tumour is  Any area of skin thickening
diagnosed early in the Stage 0 and I it ensures 100%
cure and the survival rate is high but this rate gradually The radiologists classify the breasts in two
decreases when the tumour reaches upper stages from categories namely soft breasts and dense breasts. Soft
93% for Stage II, 72% for Stage III and 22% for Stage breasts appear to be more transparent to mammogram
IV. So it is very important to diagnose the tumour in the whereas dense breasts are thicker and it is difficult to
early stages. The diagnosis of cancer involves various locate tiny lumps or tumours in them thus posing some
procedures starting from self-examination of breasts errors such as false-positive and false-negative values.
after which oncologists might advise for
mammography, breast ultrasound, biopsy or breast
MRI.
The mammography is a method of passing x-
rays into the breasts after which the images are analysed
by radiologists to detect abnormalities. These images
shows the areas of micro-calcifications and lumps.
There are chances that these structures are not
cancerous also the nature of breasts influence the
mammogram resulting in the False-Positive and False-
Negative values. The variations in mammography led to
Fine-Needle aspiration cytology (1). The False-Positive
value is something that will be detected as a lump but
that is actually not a cancerous tumour. Conversely

M. Lakshmitha, A. Abdul Hayum ISSN (Online): 2348 – 3539

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International Journal of Inventions in Computer Science and Engineering, Volume 6 Issue 5-7 May-July 2019
Fig 1.1. Mammogram image from new and old
technologies
The technology of computerizing the process of
diagnosis of breast cancer from the mammogram
images without the need of a radiologist or oncologist
has been growing day by day and machine learning
becomes an inevitable part of this development. The
accuracy of diagnosis with experienced Physician is
found to be 79.97% while with Machine Learning it is
91.1% (3).
II. MACHINE LEARNING APPROACHES
The art of training machines with numerous data
and testing them to perform in a desired way reduces
the time and effort put through by performing the same
task manually.
There are two different types in machine learning
 Supervised Learning
 Reinforcement learning
This paper focuses on classification of breast
cancer as benign or malignant. For the classification of
images there are some algorithms such as K-nearest
neighbours, Support Vector Machines (SVM), decision
trees and so on. But before applying the algorithm there
are some preparation steps to be performed on the data
in order to prepare the data for training. Once the data is
prepared then it can be split into training and testing
data sets.
Machine learning offers list of approaches or
algorithms for classification. The task lies in choosing
the best algorithm for the required dataset. The machine
learning approaches for classifying given set of data are
as follows,
1) Linear Classifier
a. Logistic Regression
b. Naïve Bayes
2) K - Nearest Neighbour
3) Support Vector Machine
4) Decision Trees
5) Boosted Trees
6) Random Forest
7) Neural Networks
2.1. LINEAR CLASSIFIER – NAÏVE BAYES:
This algorithm is simple in implementation and it
can be used effectively for large datasets. Naïve Bayes
is selected when the presence of a particular feature is
unrelated to any other feature which means they are
independent of features. It is a fast algorithm and works
well even with less training data.[7]
Algorithm:
I. The dataset is divided into 2 classes and 2 sets.
II. Calculate Mean and Standard Deviation for
each feature and each class.
M. Lakshmitha, A. Abdul Hayum
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III. Creating summary of each class and each
feature.
IV. Finding probability of each features.
V. Finding the probability of each class as the
multiplication of all features.
VI. Predict the class of instance.
Limitation: One important problem about this
algorithm is Zero Probability. This is a condition that
occurs when probability of a feature is zero thus it fails
to give valid prediction.
2.2. K- NEAREST NEIGHBOUR:
This approach takes a bunch of label points and
when a new point enters it looks for the most nearer
point.[7]. In contrast to Naïve Bayes this algorithm
classifies data with the feature similarity. It works well
for noisy inputs.
Algorithm:
I. The input data set is split into training and
testing data, mostly 80% for training and 20%
for testing.
II. Pick an instance from the testing set and
compute its distance with the training set
III. Listing distances in ascending order.
IV. The class of instance is the most common class
first 3 training instances.
Limitation: The value of K denotes the nearest
distance between each points and this is done for each
sample and each instance thus increases the
computational cost.
2.3. DECISION TREES:
A large dataset is broken down into various subsets
until it ends up with a leaf node having the least cost.
This leaf node is the one from which the classifier
is chosen.
Fig. 2.1. Decision Tree Representation
Limitation: Decision Trees are found to be unstable
because even a small variation in the data results in a
different tree.
ISSN (Online): 2348 – 3539
International Journal of Inventions in Computer Science and Engineering, Volume 6 Issue 5-7 May-July 2019

2.4. SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE: Regression provides a relation between

independent and dependant datasets along with
In a support vector machine, the provided data set explaining the factors that lead to classification.
is mapped in space and when a new data enters the
points are separated by a hyperplane with a wide gap.
SVM can be effectively used for high dimensional data
set.

Fig. 2.2. SVM hyperplane

Fig. 2.4. Logistic Regression Gradient
Algorithm:
Limitation: Regression algorithm works only when
I. Prepare the dataset by dividing it into testing the data is binary.
and training set.
II. In the training set prepare a validation set.
III LITERATURE SURVEY
III. The necessary features are selected for
classification.
Machine learning is a vast technology. In order
IV. Find the best hyperplane parameters.
to know the different technologies available many
V. Test the model with the test set.
research papers are studies and previous paper works
Limitation: Probability estimator is not provided are analysed. This will show the nature of algorithms
directly. used and will help in selecting the best approach
required. This section includes list of papers ranging
2.5. RANDOM FOREST: from 2010 to 2018 giving a clear understanding of
Supervised Machine Learning Techniques.
This algorithm belongs to an ensemble learning
methods. It constructs a multitude of decision trees and Li Rong [1] in 2010 derived a relation between
uses average value to improve accuracy. SVM and KNN in 2 theories where SVM = 1 KNN,
each class has one support vector and it is not for whole
class representation. Conversely in KNN each support
vector is taken as a representative point in which more
information is used. It concludes, SVM has an accuracy
of 96.9% but when SVM is combined with KNN the
accuracy is boasted to 98.19%.

Ahmet Mert [3] in 2011 incorporated

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to reduce the
dimension of WDBC dataset as a pre-processing
procedure. Then the data with reduced dimension was
classified with SVM whose accuracy was 93.71% and
with the original data without ICA technique the
accuracy was surprisingly increased to 95.8%.
Fig. 2.3. Random Forest Tree Representation
Xiufeng Yang [4] in 2013 worked with
Limitation: Since it has the ability to handle large
multiple kernels in SVM by using ISOMAP where a
data the algorithm becomes too complex hence
high dimensional data is projected into a low
increases the implementation cost.
dimensional space. The SVM classifier was used along
with Radial Basis kernel Function and poly kernel. This
2.6. LOGISTIC REGRESSION:

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International Journal of Inventions in Computer Science and Engineering, Volume 6 Issue 5-7 May-July 2019

reduced the dimension of WDBC data to 5 and having a
good accuracy of 98.2%.
P. Hamsagayathri [6] in 2017 performed
decision tree classification with J48 classifier in order to
reduce the size of the tree and the number of leaf nodes.
This method also eliminated the repetitive sub-trees by
implementing attribute priority. The dataset employed
was from SEER and it was witnessed that J48 classifier
showed an accuracy of 98.5% reducing computational
cost and complexity by increasing the memory size.
Meriem Armane [7] in 2018 compared the
Naïve Bayes and KNN algorithm in the same data set
WBCD from UCI. This dataset analyses different
characteristics assigned by pathologists in order to
classify Breast Cancer such as lump thickness,
uniformity of cell shape or size, bare nuclei etc. most of
the time NB is combines with other algorithms for
classification. Through the results from simulation the
author has noted the accuracy of KNN is 97.5% which
is higher than that of NB which has 96.19%.
Youness Khourdifi and Mohamed Bahaj [8] in
2018 proposed a survey on selecting the best classifier
for Breast Cancer prediction by comparing various data
mining algorithms. They used a 10-fold cross-validation
TABLE 4.1. COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES
test to evaluate predictive models. The results of
simulating each algorithms gives different values of
time required to build the model and accuracy. Among
4 different classifiers SVM has the highest accuracy of
97.9% with processing time of 0.08 s and KNN with the
least of computation time of 0 s is a lazy model as it
does not work much. Also Random Frost and Naïve
Bayes has been estimated to have highest error rates.
Anusha Barath [19] in 2018 used a WBCD
dataset using 80% of data for training and the remaining
for testing. They worked on each algorithm NB, KNN,
SVM and CART without standardizing and the
accuracy is found to be above 92%. On the other hand
after standardizing the dataset the accuracy of the SVM
is increased drastically to 99.1%. This proves that fine-
tuning of parameters improves the accuracy of the
classifier.
IV COMPARISON OF ML ALGORITHMS
A table is formulated by comparing different
approaches in classification of breast cancer. This
shows the advantages and disadvantages of the list of
algorithms that enables the proper selection of
appropriate algorithm for the dataset and for the right
application.

ALGORITHMS ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES

Linear Classifier:  Even Large datasets can be  Zero probability- fails
Naïve bayes easily built to give valid prediction
 Fast model and works  NB is a bad estimator.
effectively for less training
data
Linear classifier –  Ability to explain the features  It works only when the
Logistic Regression that lead to classification. predicted variable is
binary.
K- nearest  Classifies data just with  Computational cost is
Neighbours. feature similarity. high.
 This model works well for
noisy inputs.
Support Vector  Highly memory efficient.  Probability estimation
Machines  SVM is well suited for high is not provided directly
dimensional space.
 Important values in SVM
 Kernel type
 Gamma value
 C value
Decision Trees  Ability to handle both  Small variations in the
numerical and categorical data results in a
data. different tree
 Makes classification easier by  Unstable.
breaking down large datasets
into small subsets.
Random Forest  Ability to handle large data  RF is a complex
 It can handle missing data algorithm and is
while computing difficult to implement.

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International Journal of Inventions in Computer Science and Engineering, Volume 6 Issue 5-7 May-July 2019
From the table, it is evident that each algorithm
is used in particular situations and it depends on the
datasets. The datasets that are considered in
classification may be of images or just numerical data
and its length is also accounted for the right algorithm.
As a compilation of the literature survey the Support
Vector Machine algorithms found to be used often
providing good accuracy. Moreover SVM can be
combined with other algorithms to improve the
efficiency and accuracy [4]. Usually the breast cancer
classification employs only 2 categories such as Benign
or malignant so it is much efficient to use binary SVM
classifier than adopting other classifiers.in order to
achieve improved results proper pre-processing
techniques can be followed.
CONCLUSION
This paper is a survey of various algorithms
available in machine learning to classify the breast
cancer. The survey was conducted from a collection of
standard papers published by researchers and content
studied from authorized websites. It provides an insight
of selecting a suitable algorithm in classification of
breast mammogram images. In regards to the survey
SVM is found to be best suited for binary classification
of breast cancer.
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