IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL.
70, 2021
A Weighted Discriminative Extreme Learning
Machine Design for Lung Cancer Detection by
an Electronic Nose System
Leilei Zhao , Junhui Qian , Member, IEEE, Fengchun Tian , Member, IEEE, Ran Liu , Bei Liu ,
Shuya Zhang , and Mengchen Lu
Abstract— This article presents a study on lung cancer detec-
tion based on electronic nose technology. The pattern recognition
algorithm is extremely crucial for an electronic nose system, but
the customary learning algorithms usually prefer the majority
class for class imbalance learning due to the assumption of
equal misclassification costs. To address this challenge, in this
article, we propose a novel classification method named weighted
discriminative extreme learning machine (WDELM) for lung
cancer diagnosis. First, the WDELM assigns a different weight
to each particular sample by using a flexible weighting strat-
egy, which enables it to perform classification tasks with the
unbalanced class distribution. Then, an alternating iterative
algorithm is proposed to solve the convex objective function with
a theoretical analysis presented. Finally, the effectiveness of the
proposed method has been evaluated on lung cancer datasets
and public datasets by comparing it with conventional methods.
Experimental results have confirmed that the WDELM surpasses
conventional methods and is competent for lung cancer diagnosis.
Index Terms— Class imbalance learning, electronic nose,
extreme learning machine (ELM), lung cancer, volatile organic
compounds (VOCs).
I. I NTRODUCTION
L UNG cancer remains the main cause of cancer incidence
(11.6% of the total cases) and mortality (18.4% of the
total cancer deaths), with 2.1 million new lung cancer cases
and 1.8 million deaths estimated in 2018 [1]. Detection at a
late stage is one of the leading causes of high mortality from
lung cancer. In 2014, the U.K. Office for National Statistics
Manuscript received April 17, 2021; accepted May 17, 2021. Date of
publication May 27, 2021; date of current version June 11, 2021. This
work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China under Grant 62001064, in part by the Chongqing Science and
Technology Commission under Grant cstc2020jcyj-msxmX0705 and Grant
cstc2019jscx-gksbX0092, and in part by the Entrepreneurship and Inno-
vation Support Plan of Chongqing for Returned Overseas Scholars under
Grant cx2020090. The Associate Editor coordinating the review process was
Dr. Mohamad Forouzanfar. (Leilei Zhao and Junhui Qian are co-first authors.)
(Corresponding author: Junhui Qian.)
Leilei Zhao, Junhui Qian, Bei Liu, Shuya Zhang, and Mengchen Lu are with
the School of Microelectronic and Communication Engineering, Chongqing
University, Chongqing 400044, China (e-mail: leileizhao@cqu.edu.cn;
junhuiq@cqu.edu.cn; liubei@cqu.edu.cn; shuyazhang@cqu.edu.cn;
lumengchen@cqu.edu.cn).
Fengchun Tian is with the Chongqing Key Laboratory of Bio-Perception &
Intelligent Information Processing, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044,
China (e-mail: fengchuntian@cqu.edu.cn).
Ran Liu is with the College of Computer Science, Chongqing University,
Chongqing 400044, China (e-mail: rliu@cqu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2021.3084312
1557-9662 © 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
2509709
reported that the one-year survival rate of patients diagnosed
with distant metastatic disease (stage IV) is only 15%–19%,
compared with 81%–85% for stage I [2], [3]. Therefore, early
diagnosis increases the chances of effective treatment, thereby
improving survival rates.
As a golden standard for diagnosis of lung cancer,
the biopsy is invasive, technically complex and high cost,
therefore, it cannot be easily used for patients. Computerized
tomography (CT) offers a noninvasive method for detecting
abnormalities potentially being cancer, but it has the disad-
vantages of high cost, ionizing radiation, and false positive.
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a precise noninva-
sive imaging test for the diagnosis of pulmonary nodules
and larger mass lesions. In current practice, although PET
has high sensitivity (96.8%) and middle specificity (77.8%)
for malignancy [4], its technology is complicated and the
price is extremely high. Hence, a cheaper, more convenient,
non-radioactive, and noninvasive method for diagnosing lung
cancer is imperative.
The electronic nose, also known as an artificial olfactory
system, is a kind of gas analysis system which imitates biolog-
ical olfactory mechanism [5]. The scope of electronic noses
available today is not limited to devices based on chemical
sensors, but also devices based on optical sensors, or even
systems without a modular setup such as mass spectrometers
or flash gas chromatographs [6]. They have been widely used
in many fields, such as food and beverage, environmental
monitoring, and disease diagnosis [7]. The classical electronic
nose system is mainly composed of a sensor array and a
pattern recognition algorithm. It is still a popular way due to
its similarity to the biological model and extensive application
experience.
In recent years, the classical electronic nose has been widely
used in the diagnosis of diseases by exhaled breath [8]–[10].
Its main principle is to measure changes of volatile organic
compounds (VOCs) in breath to reflect changes in tissue
and cellular metabolism in order to assess human health
status and types of disease. During the measurement process,
the sensor array converts chemical information in the VOCs
into electrical signal patterns, and then an appropriate pattern
recognition algorithm is used to complete the diagnosis.
The VOCs, such as ketones and alcohols, in exhaled breath
of lung cancer patients, have been reported in many literature
 2509709
Fig. 1. Overall structure of the experimental platform.
works [11]–[13]. Based on these achievements, electronic nose
technology for diagnosing lung cancer has been extensively
studied. For example, in [6], the authors provided a review of
the use of electronic nose technology for lung cancer diagnosis
from 2008 to 2018. The results showed that electronic nose
techniques using exhaled breath component could detect lung
cancer with a sensitivity ranging from 71% to 96% and
specificity from 33% to 100%. In [14], authors designed an
electronic nose system using ten gas sensors of four types
and then analyzed 268 breath samples. The results showed
that when using the random forest classification method with
features extracted by LDA and fast ICA, the accuracy and
AUC are 86.42% and 0.87, respectively. Generally, all the
above studies face some common restrictions. First, there
is a lack of technical standards for sample collection and
analysis [15]. Second, the level of the electronic nose sys-
tem is always conditioned by sensor technology and pattern
recognition algorithm [16]–[21].
Inspired by the previous work, in this study, we explored
further the method of diagnosing lung cancer through exhaled
breath based on electronic nose technology. First, in the sample
collection, we use an alveolar gas collector to collect effective
alveolar gas and reduce the interference of dead space gas.
Second, since the concentration of VOCs is extremely low
(ppb-ppt), we use an electronic nose system with VOCs
enrichment technology designed in the previous work to
detect exhaled breath samples [22]–[25], which can capture
weaker biomarker information related to lung cancer. Third,
we propose a new weighted algorithm to solve the problem of
class imbalance and improve the recognition rate.
Faced with imbalanced data distributions, conventional
methods have a natural tendency to favor the majority class
due to the assumption of an equilibrium class distribution or
an equal cost of misclassification. In order to rebalance the
data distributions, a popular strategy is to allocate a differ-
ent misclassification cost for each given example [26], [27].
Hence, we propose a weighted classification method named
weighted discriminative extreme learning machine (WDELM)
to improve the detection capability of the electronic nose
Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
system. Based on discriminative extreme learning machine
(DELM) [28], the WDELM assigns large penalty weights
to samples from classes with small sample sizes and small
penalty weights to samples from classes with large sample
sizes. Specifically, the WDELM uses the power of the recip-
rocal of the sample size of each class as the weight of samples
in this class, it makes classes with a small sample size to
be valued and balances the classification results of different
classes.
Since the objective function of WDELM includes two
unknown variables, an alternating iterative algorithm is pre-
sented to solve it, and its convergence and complexity are
theoretically analyzed. In addition, due to a flexible weighting
strategy, the proposed model is not only applicable to class
unbalanced data, but also class balanced data, and it is also
simple and easy to implement. Finally, the effectiveness of
WDELM is evaluated on lung cancer datasets and public
datasets. At the same time, we also compare it with four
classical methods, including support vector machine (SVM),
extreme learning machine (ELM), DELM, and weighted
extreme learning machine (WELM). The experimental results
show that WDELM does indeed balance the recognition rate
of different classes and improves the overall accuracy, and is
competent for lung cancer diagnosis.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows.
Section II mainly describes the construction of the experi-
mental platform. In Section III, the data collection process is
described. In Section IV, the proposed approach and algorithm
analysis are presented. Next, data preprocessing and feature
engineering are implemented in Section V. In Section VI,
the experimental results are presented whereby comparing the
proposed method with other conventional methods. Finally,
a conclusion and a vision for the future are offered in
Section VII.
II. E XPERIMENTAL P LATFORM
The experimental platform for lung cancer detection is
mainly composed of an electronic nose system and an alveolar
gas collection system. The overall structure is shown in Fig. 1.
 ZHAO et al.: WDELM DESIGN FOR LUNG CANCER DETECTION BY ELECTRONIC NOSE SYSTEM
Fig. 2. Physical structure of the electronic nose system.
TABLE I
I NFORMATION OF G AS S ENSORS
Since the alveolar gas associated with lung cancer detection is
located at the end of the exhaled breath, we use the alveolar
gas collector to collect alveolar gas by breathing through the
mouth, which can reduce the interference of dead space gas.
Then the exhaled breath is injected into the electronic nose
system, and sensor arrays convert the chemical information of
VOCs in the gas into electrical signal patterns.
The electronic nose system consists of a sampling unit,
a detection unit, a pre-concentration unit, and an upper com-
puter unit. Fig. 2 shows a physical picture of the electronic
nose system. The sampling unit includes Teflon gas bags,
three-way valves (T1 and T2), a mass flow controller, a micro
vacuum pump, and an I/O control board. The detection unit
includes gas sensor arrays with conformal gas chambers,
a signal conditioning circuit, a data acquisition card, and a
single-chip microcomputer. The information of gas sensors
is shown in Table I. The pre-concentration unit includes
adsorption tubes and a heating system. The upper computer
unit includes a software system developed by C# to control the
experiment process automatically and manage the experiment
data.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
2509709
TABLE II
S TATISTICAL R ESULTS A BOUT S UBJECTS IN THE E XPERIMENTAL G ROUP
AND THE C ONTROL G ROUP
The alveolar gas collection system mainly consists of a
three-way valve (T3), a flowmeter, and a processor. When
blowing from air inlet for the first time, a control model is
trained, in which gas flow rate is measured by the flowmeter
and the blowing time t0 is recorded by the processor. Next,
with each blow, when it reaches 2/3t0 , the three-way valve
switches from the exhaust port to the collection port and the
alveolar gas is collected in a Teflon bag. When the flow rate
becomes 0, it is judged that one blowing process is end. After
blowing five times, the model will be retrained to adapt to
changes in human breathing rhythm. Repeat this process until
the end of sampling.
III. DATA C OLLECTION
There are two steps for data collection. In the first step,
exhaled breath samples are collected in the hospital by an
alveolar gas collection system. In the second step, the gas
samples are converted into electrical signals through prototype
machine experiments based on an electronic nose system.
All gas samples were collected in the ChongQing Cancer
Hospital and this study had passed ethical review. We recruited
subjects from society, all of whom must be over 18 years
old and sign an informed consent form. All subjects are
partitioned into an experimental group and a control group.
The experimental group includes 84 lung cancer patients
diagnosed by biopsy. The control group includes 36 healthy
people, three chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
patients and one pneumonia patient. The statistical results of
all subjects are shown in Table II. The selection criteria for
lung cancer patients are that they are diagnosed by biopsy,
have no diabetes, and no other active diseases. The patients
with lung disease must have no history of cancer and no
disease other than lung disease, which increases the types
of control samples. Healthy people must have no history of
cancer and be in good health without taking any drugs recently.
All subjects do not eat breakfast and brush their teeth before
collecting gas to minimize the negative effects of exogenous
VOCs. The exhaled gases are collected by the alveolar gas
collector and then stored in a Teflon bag. The volume of each
gas sample is 10 L. Next, the chemical information in the
gas is converted into electrical signals by prototype experi-
ments. A single experiment lasts 66.5 min, which is roughly
divided into four stages: baseline, pre-concentration, injection,
and cleaning with the duration of 6, 32.5, 6, and 22 min,
 2509709 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021

respectively. In the baseline stage, we mainly collect the where B and M are unknown matrices that need to be learned,
response values of sensors when air (P1) and helium (P2) are M is nonnegative,  denotes Hadamard product, λ is a
introduced. In the pre-concentration stage, VOCs in the gas regularization parameter, H is the output matrix of hidden
are first enriched by the adsorption tubes (P3), then the excess layer, that is, H = g(X), g is a sigmoid activation function, E
water vapor is removed (P4), and then the temperature rises is defined as
for desorption (P5). During the injection stage (P6), we collect 
+1, if Yi j = 1
response signals generated by the interaction between the Ei j = (2)
VOCs and the material of sensors. In the cleaning stage, −1, if Yi j = 0
the pre-concentration system (P7) and sensor array (P8) are and W is a diagonal weight matrix and the diagonal elements
cleaned successively. For each experiment, we set the sampling are defined as
frequency to 1 Hz and a total of 3990 data points are
collected. Finally, we collect a total of 124 samples, with the Wii = (1/n j )t , if xi ∈ C j , i = 1, 2, . . . , n (3)
experimental group and control group including 84 and 40,
where n j is the number of samples with class j, parameter t
respectively.
controls the intensity of weight.
Since there are two unknown variables in the objective
IV. WDELM FOR C LASS I MBALANCE L EARNING function (1), we present an alternating iterative algorithm to
The pattern recognition algorithm is an important part of the solve this optimization problem. The main idea is to iteratively
electronic nose system, which determines the final accuracy. update one of the variables while fixing the other. The first step
In the face of unbalanced data distributions between the is to fix M and update B, let T = WY+EM and Hw = WH,
experimental group and control group, traditional methods then we can update B by solving the following problem:
are easily misled due to their sensitivity to class distribution.
In this section, we propose a weighted approach to overcome minHw B − T2F + λB2F . (4)
B
this difficulty and thus improve the accuracy of the electronic
We denote this objective function as f (B) and take the
nose system.
derivative of f (B) with respect to B
 
A. Related Work ∂ f (B) ∂ Hw B − T2F + λB2F
=
ELM is a single hidden layer feedforward neural network ∂B  ∂B   
in which hidden nodes are randomly initialized and then ∂tr (Hw B − T)T (Hw B − T) + λ∂tr BT B
=
fixed, and only the weights between the hidden layer and ∂B
output layer need to be learned [29]. Due to the advantages = 2HwT Hw B − 2HwT T + 2λB. (5)
of fast learning, reaching a global optimum, and universal
Set it equal to zero, we can obtain
approximation capability, ELM and its variants have been
extensively studied in various fields [30]. Recently, DELM B = (HwT Hw + λI)−1 HwT T. (6)
is proposed to improve the classification ability of ELM
by introducing the ε-dragging technique [31] and empirical In the second step, given B, let R = W(HB − Y), then M
studies have shown it is effective and has good generalization. can be solved from the following problem:
minR − E  M2F
M
B. Weighted Discriminative Extreme Learning Machine s.t. M ≥ 0. (7)
Facing class imbalance data, traditional methods naturally
tend to favor the majority class and ignore the minority class On account of the squared Frobenius norm of matrix can
due to the assumption of balanced class distribution or equal be decoupled element by element, (7) can be equivalently
misclassification cost, which makes the overall learning ability decomposed into n × k subproblems. For the ith row and
worse. The WDELM improves the conventional classifiers by jth column element of matrix M, we have
applying large weights to samples from the class with small  2
min Ri j − Ei j Mi j
sample sizes and applying small weights to samples from the Mi j
class with large sample sizes, so the classification accuracies of s.t. Mi j ≥ 0 (8)
the different classes are balanced and the overall discriminative
ability of the model is improved. where Ri j and Ei j are the ith row and jth column of R and E,
Let X = [x1 , x2 , . . . , xn ]T ∈ Rn× p and Y = [y1 , y2 , . . . , respectively. Note that E2i j = 1, considering the nonnegative
yn ]T ∈ Rn×k , where yi = [0, . . . , 0, 1, 0, . . . , 0]T ∈ Rk with constraint about Mi j , we can easily get
only the j-th element equal to one if xi ∈ C j , C j is the set Mi j = max(Ei j Ri j , 0). (9)
consisting of samples of class j, j = 1, 2, . . . , k. The objective
function of the proposed method is formulated as Accordingly, M can be finally computed by

minW(HB − Y) − E  M2F + λB2F M = max(E  R, 0). (10)

B,M
s.t. M ≥ 0 (1) Algorithm 1 lists the steps of the WDELM algorithm.

Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 ZHAO et al.: WDELM DESIGN FOR LUNG CANCER DETECTION BY ELECTRONIC NOSE SYSTEM 2509709

Algorithm 1 WDELM for Classification sufficient information about the classifier’s performance. For
Require: feature matrix H, label matrix Y, parameter λ, example, given a binary classification problem, its samples
parameter t and maximum number of iterations m 0 consist of 1% positive class and 99% negative class. By clas-
Ensure: B sifying all samples into negative class, any silly classifier can
1: initialize M = 0, B = 0
0 0 easily achieve 99% accuracy. While 99% overall accuracy
2: Let m = 1 seems pretty impressive, the accuracy of the minority category
3: optimize B and M is actually 0 and should not be ignored.
4: Hw = WH In order to get a better insight into the properties of a clas-
−1 T sifier, in this article, we use accuracy and G-mean to evaluate
5: G = (HT w Hw + λI) Hw
6: while m < m 0 do the performance of the classifiers. For binary classification
7: Tm−1 = WY + E  Mm−1 problems, we use TP, TN, FP, and FN stand for true positive,
8: Bm = GTm−1 true negative, false positive, and false negative, respectively,
9: Rm = W(HBm − Y) then
10: Mm = max(E  Rm , 0) TP + TN
Accuracy = (14)
11: if Bm − Bm−1 2F < 10−3 , then TP + TN + FP + FN
12: break. TP
Sensitivity = (15)
13: end if TP + FN
14: m =m+1 TN
specificity = (16)
 + FP
15: end while TN
G-mean = Sensitivity × specificity. (17)

C. Convergence and Complexity Analysis
Here, analyses of algorithm convergence and complexity are
presented. Denote the value of the objective function at mth
iteration as J (Bm , Mm ). At the m + 1th iteration, we first fix
Mm and solve subproblem (4), then Bm+1 is obtained by (6).
Because subproblem (4) is convex, we have
J (Bm+1 , Mm ) ≤ J (Bm , Mm ).
Next, we fix Bm+1 and solve subproblem (7), then Mm+1 can
be obtained by (10). Since subproblem (7) is also convex,
we get
J (Bm+1 , Mm+1 ) ≤ J (Bm+1 , Mm ).
Combining (11) with (12), we have
J (Bm+1 , Mm+1 ) ≤ J (Bm , Mm ).
So, the value of the objective function J (B, M) is monotone
decreasing at each iteration. And because the objective func-
tion clearly has a lower bound 0, according to the monotone
convergence theorem that monotonous and boundary sequence
necessarily converge, proposed algorithm is convergent.
The computational cost of algorithm 1 focuses on the
process of solving B by matrix inversion and matrix mul-
tiplication. The computational complexities of step 5 and
steps 7–9 are O(d 2 n + d 3 ) and O(n 2 k + dnk), respectively,
where n is the number of samples, k is the number of sample
classes, and d is the number of hidden nodes in WDELM.
So, the total computational complexity of algorithm 1 is
O(d 2 n + d 3 + τ (n 2 k + dnk)), where τ is the number of
iterations. As can be seen, the overall computational cost of
the proposed method is inexpensive.
Obviously, for the above example, the G-mean will be as low
as 0 because the accuracy for the minority class is 0. Therefore,
it is more comprehensive that the accuracy and G-mean are
used to assess the performance of a classifier.
V. DATA P REPROCESSING AND F EATURE E NGINEERING
After data collection, the result data will enter the pipeline
(11)
composed of data filtering, feature extraction, feature selection,
and pattern recognition. The noises in the original signals can
be removed by filtering, and the optimal subset of features
can be selected from the original large number of features by
feature engineering, which is useful for the subsequent pattern
(12)
recognition task.
(13) A. Data Filtering
For each experiment, we will obtain the curves of sensor
signal. In order to reduce noise, moving average filtering
technology is used to make the curve smoother. Given original
signal x = (x 1 , x 2 , . . . , x n ), the filtered signal y is generated
by
y(i ) = [sum(i )−max(i )−min(i )]/(s −2), i = s, . . . , n (18)
where s is a step size, sum(i ), max(i ) and min(i ) are the sum,
the maximum value and the minimum value of the sequence
(x i , x i−1 , . . . , x i−s+1 ), respectively.
Considering that the trend is similar for almost all gas sensor
response curves, we select gas sensor MR516 to illustrate the
effect of data filtering. Let s = 15, the original and filtered
curves of sensor response are shown in Fig. 3. Obviously,
the response curve becomes smoother than before filtering.

D. Evaluation Criteria B. Feature Extraction

Generally, the overall accuracy is used to measure the In the filtered data, a sample contains twenty time
effectiveness of a classifier. Unfortunately, in case the data series curves, each with dimension 3990. Encountering such
distributions are unbalanced, this metric may not provide high-dimensional data, dimensionality reduction is necessary.

Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 2509709
Fig. 3. Original curve and filtered curve of sensor response.
Hence, for each time series curve, we extract two features from
the helium baseline and the injection phase. The two features
are
f 1 = Max(P6)
 − Mean(P2)
f 2 = (x − Mean(P2))d x
P6
where Max(P6) represents the maximum value of the P6
stage and Mean(P2) represents the mean of the P2 stage.
After feature extraction, a large amount of redundant data is
removed, and the data dimension of each sample becomes
forty.
C. Feature Selection
In the feature extraction process, we treat all sensors equally
and extract the same features. However, some sensors may
be useless for the detection of lung cancer biomarkers, then
the features extracted from these sensors are redundant for
the final classification. Therefore, it is worthwhile to further
optimize features through feature selection.
We use the trace ratio criterion (TRC) algorithm to per-
form feature selection [32]. TRC is a general graph-based
feature selection framework, it directly optimizes the scores
of feature subset instead of treating each feature individually,
thus achieves the optimum subset-level score. Based on the
TRC algorithm, we use the WDELM classifier to evaluate
the performance of feature subsets with different sizes by
leave-one-out cross validation. According to the principles of
accuracy and G-mean optimality, we obtain the optimal feature
subset consisting of five features. The sensors corresponding
to the features are WSP2110, MP901, and SP3S-AQ2-01,
which provide guidance for the design of the sensor array
later. Principal component analysis (PCA) plots before and
after feature selection are presented in Fig. 4(a) and (b),
respectively. Obviously, the classification task will be easier
to perform after feature selection.
VI. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
A. Experimental Scheme
Based on the feature data, the proposed classification
method is used to establish the discriminant model of a
Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
Fig. 4. Three dimensional PCA diagram of all features and selected features.
(a) PCA diagram of all features. (b) PCA diagram of selected features.
lung cancer diagnosis. First, we evaluate the effectiveness of
the model by using leave-one-out cross-validation. Second,
we arrange the samples in the order of time of collection,
then we take the last h samples as a test set and the remaining
samples as a training set to evaluate the robustness of the
proposed model. We use the min–max normalization method
to standardize the data in order to eliminate the differences in
magnitude between features.
In addition, we also evaluate the proposed classification
(19) method on a gas sensor array drift dataset taken from the
UCI machine learning repository [33]. There is a lot of data
(20) in this dataset and we select batch 1. It is divided into six
classes with a total of 445 samples and the sample size of
class 4 is significantly smaller than other classes. Therefore,
we will compare WDELM with other classical algorithms on
datasets composed of class 4 and other classes, respectively.
In each dataset, we use the z-score method to standardize the
data and perform ten times tenfold cross validation, then the
mean recognition results are presented for comparison.
For ELM-based algorithms, the number of hidden nodes
is set to 100 in all our experiments. Because according to
the theorem in [34], single-hidden layer feedforward networks
with at most N hidden neurons can learn N distinct samples
with zero error. For each algorithm, we use grid search to find
the optimal hyper-parameters. Finally, we report the accuracy
and G-mean of five classification algorithms and compare
WDELM with SVM, ELM, DELM, and WELM.
B. Results and Discussion
Table III shows the classification results of different meth-
ods on the dataset from the electronic nose system for lung
cancer detection. It is obvious that the overall recognition rate
has been improved after feature selection. At the same time,
the proposed method exceeds other traditional methods and
achieves the best performance. Some methods seem to have
achieved amazing sensitivity, but they come at the expense of
specificity. Contrast the inability of traditional methods in the
face of imbalanced data, the WDELM improves the specificity
by giving large weights to samples from the class with small
sample sizes, and thus achieves a balanced recognition result.
In addition, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC)
curves of the classification results of five algorithms are
presented in Fig. 5(a)–(e), and it can be seen that WDELM
achieves a competitive result with the area under curve (AUC)
value of 0.90 and the 95% confidence interval of 0.82–0.95.
See Fig. 5(f) for the box plot of predicted values from the
control group and experimental group by WDELM. Applying
 ZHAO et al.: WDELM DESIGN FOR LUNG CANCER DETECTION BY ELECTRONIC NOSE SYSTEM
TABLE III
E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS B EFORE AND A FTER F EATURE S ELECTION ON
THE L UNG C ANCER D ATASET
Fig. 5. ROC curves of five classifiers and box plot of the classification
result of WDELM classifier. (a) ROC curve of SVM classifier. (b) ROC curve
of ELM classifier. (c) ROC curve of DELM classifier. (d) ROC curve of
WELM classifier. (e) ROC curve of WDELM classifier. (f) Box plot of the
classification result of WDELM classifier.
a Wilcoxon rank-sum test to the set of predicted values,
p value is much less than 0.001 indicates that there is a
significant statistical difference between the predicted values
of the experimental group and the control group generated by
the classifier WDELM.
Fig. 6 shows that the classification results of proposed
method versus parameters λ and t on the experimental elec-
tronic nose dataset. It can be seen that the proposed method
achieves a satisfactory performance when λ and t are taken in
the appropriate range. See Fig. 7 for the testing results of the
last h samples. It can be seen that the proposed method has a
better performance than other methods overall. The accuracy
and G-mean value of the WDELM method overall exceed
92% and 0.87. This result shows that the model based on
the proposed method is effective and robust for the diagnosis
of lung cancer.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
2509709
Fig. 6. Relationship between classification results and two parameters.
(a) Relationship between accuracy and parameters. (b) Relationship between
G-mean and parameters.
Fig. 7. Testing accuracy and G-mean of five algorithms for the latest h
samples. (a) Accuracy of latest h samples. (b) G-mean of latest h samples.
TABLE IV
E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS FOR F IVE M ETHODS ON THE D RIFT D ATASET
Table IV shows the classification results of different meth-
ods on the gas sensor array drift dataset. It can be seen
that the proposed WDELM achieves better performance than
other classical methods in terms of accuracy and G-mean.
Classifier SVM, ELM, and DELM lead to low recognition
rate and G-mean value due to over-fitting the class with large
sample size, WELM leads to low recognition rate due to the
lack of ε-dragging technique, while our method significantly
improves the shortcomings of other methods and achieves the
best accuracy and G-mean value.
VII. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE P ERSPECTIVES
The most important results of our study are as follows. First,
a complete workflow for the diagnosis of lung cancer through
 2509709 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
electronic nose technology is explored and initial clinical val-
idation also achieves encouraging results. Second, a WDELM
is proposed to overcome the problem of class imbalance, and
an alternating iterative algorithm and theoretical analysis are
given. Third, the proposed method has achieved much better
performance than conventional methods not only on the exper-
imental electronic nose dataset but also on the public dataset.
However, despite the encouraging diagnostic results
obtained, the data collected to date provide only preliminary
information. Due to the limited number of individuals included
in the study, no firm conclusions can be drawn. Thereafter,
lung cancer diagnosis based on electronic nose technology
should be further explored to validate and confirm the initial
findings, and eventually clinical applications are realized.
R EFERENCES
[1] F. Bray, J. Ferlay, I. Soerjomataram, R. L. Siegel, L. A. Torre,
and A. Jemal, “Global cancer statistics 2018: GLOBOCAN estimates
of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 coun-
tries,” CA, A Cancer J. Clinicians, vol. 68, no. 6, pp. 394–424,
Nov. 2018.
[2] S. B. Knight, P. A. Crosbie, H. Balata, J. Chudziak, T. Hussell, and
C. Dive, “Progress and prospects of early detection in lung cancer,”
Open Biol., vol. 7, no. 9, Sep. 2017, Art. no. 170070.
[3] J. Broggio and N. Bannister, “Cancer survival by stage at diagnosis
for England,” Office Nat. Statist., Newport, U.K., Stat. Rep., Jun. 2016,
pp. 1–23.
[4] M. K. Gould, C. C. Maclean, W. G. Kuschner, C. E. Rydzak, and
D. K. Owens, “Accuracy of positron emission tomography for diagno-
sis of pulmonary nodules and mass lesions: A meta-analysis,” Jama,
vol. 285, no. 7, pp. 914–924, 2001.
[5] J. W. Gardner and P. N. Bartlett, “A brief history of electronic noses,”
Sens. Actuators B, Chem., vol. 18, nos. 1–3, pp. 210–211, Mar. 1994.
[6] W. H. van Geffen et al., “The electronic nose: Emerging biomarkers
in Lung cancer diagnostics,” Breathe, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. e135–e141,
Dec. 2019.
[7] F. Röck, N. Barsan, and U. Weimar, “Electronic nose: Current sta-
tus and future trends,” Chem. Rev., vol. 108, no. 2, pp. 705–725,
Feb. 2008.
[8] S. Dragonieri, G. Pennazza, P. Carratu, and O. Resta, “Electronic nose
technology in respiratory diseases,” Lung, vol. 195, no. 2, pp. 157–165,
Apr. 2017.
[9] M. K. Nakhleh et al., “Diagnosis and classification of 17 diseases from
1404 subjects via pattern analysis of exhaled molecules,” ACS Nano,
vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 112–125, Jan. 2017.
[10] A. Amann et al., “Analysis of exhaled breath for disease detection,”
Annu. Rev. Anal. Chem., vol. 7, pp. 455–482, 2014.
[11] Y. Saalberg and M. Wolff, “VOC breath biomarkers in Lung cancer,”
Clinica Chim. Acta, vol. 459, pp. 5–9, Aug. 2016.
[12] J. Zhou, Z.-A. Huang, U. Kumar, and D. D. Y. Chen, “Review of recent
developments in determining volatile organic compounds in exhaled
breath as biomarkers for Lung cancer diagnosis,” Analytica Chim. Acta,
vol. 996, pp. 1–9, Dec. 2017.
[13] Z. Jia, A. Patra, V. Kutty, and T. Venkatesan, “Critical review of
volatile organic compound analysis in breath and in vitro cell culture for
detection of Lung cancer,” Metabolites, vol. 9, no. 3, p. 52, Mar. 2019.
[14] W. Li, Z. Jia, D. Xie, K. Chen, J. Cui, and H. Liu, “Recognizing Lung
cancer using a homemade E-nose: A comprehensive study,” Comput.
Biol. Med., vol. 120, May 2020, Art. no. 103706.
[15] I. Horváth et al., “A European respiratory society technical standard:
Exhaled biomarkers in Lung disease,” Eur. Respiratory J., vol. 49, no. 4,
pp. 1–26, 2017.
[16] T. Yang et al., “Resistance-capacitance gas sensor based on fractal
geometry,” Chemosensors, vol. 7, no. 3, p. 31, Jul. 2019.
[17] B. Behera, R. Joshi, G. K. A. Vishnu, S. Bhalerao, and H. J. Pandya,
“Electronic nose: A non-invasive technology for breath analysis of
diabetes and Lung cancer patients,” J. Breath Res., vol. 13, no. 2,
Mar. 2019, Art. no. 024001.
[18] H. Sun et al., “Sensor array optimization of electronic nose for detection
of bacteria in wound infection,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 64,
no. 9, pp. 7350–7358, Sep. 2017.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
[19] L. Zhang and D. Zhang, “Domain adaptation extreme learning machines
for drift compensation in E-nose systems,” IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas.,
vol. 64, no. 7, pp. 1790–1801, Jul. 2015.
[20] L. Zhang and F. Tian, “Performance study of multilayer perceptrons in
a low-cost electronic nose,” IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 63, no. 7,
pp. 1670–1679, Jul. 2014.
[21] J. Qian, F. Tian, Y. Luo, M. Lu, and A. Zhang, “A novel multi-
sensor detection system design for low concentrations of volatile organic
compounds,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., early access, May 19, 2021,
doi: 10.1109/TIE.2021.3080218.
[22] J. Qian, Y. Luo, F. Tian, R. Liu, and T. Yang, “Design of multisensor
electronic nose based on conformal sensor chamber,” IEEE Trans. Ind.
Electron., vol. 68, no. 7, pp. 6276–6285, Jul. 2021.
[23] J. Qian, A. Zhang, F. Tian, and Y. Zhang, “A pre-concentration
system design for electronic nose via finite element method,” IEEE
Trans. Circuits Syst. II, Exp. Briefs, early access, May 11, 2021, doi:
10.1109/TCSII.2021.3079163.
[24] J. Qian, M. Lops, L. Zheng, X. Wang, and Z. He, “Joint system design
for coexistence of MIMO radar and MIMO communication,” IEEE
Trans. Signal Process., vol. 66, no. 13, pp. 3504–3519, Jul. 2018.
[25] J. Qian, Z. He, N. Huang, and B. Li, “Transmit designs for spectral
coexistence of MIMO radar and MIMO communication systems,” IEEE
Trans. Circuits Syst. II, Exp. Briefs, vol. 65, no. 12, pp. 2072–2076,
Dec. 2018.
[26] W. Zong, G.-B. Huang, and Y. Chen, “Weighted extreme learn-
ing machine for imbalance learning,” Neurocomputing, vol. 101,
pp. 229–242, Feb. 2013.
[27] W. Kong et al., “Weighted extreme learning machine for P300 detection
with application to brain computer interface,” J. Ambient Intell. Hum.
Comput., pp. 1–11, May 2018.
[28] T. Guo, L. Zhang, and X. Tan, “Neuron pruning-based discriminative
extreme learning machine for pattern classification,” Cognit. Comput.,
vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 581–595, Aug. 2017.
[29] G.-B. Huang, H. Zhou, X. Ding, and R. Zhang, “Extreme learning
machine for regression and multiclass classification,” IEEE Trans. Syst.,
Man, Cybern., B, Cybern., vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 513–529, Apr. 2012.
[30] G. Huang, G.-B. Huang, S. Song, and K. You, “Trends in extreme learn-
ing machines: A review,” Neural Netw., vol. 61, pp. 32–48, Jan. 2015.
[31] S. Xiang, F. Nie, G. Meng, C. Pan, and C. Zhang, “Discriminative least
squares regression for multiclass classification and feature selection,”
IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. Learn. Syst., vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 1738–1754,
Nov. 2012.
[32] F. Nie, S. Xiang, Y. Jia, C. Zhang, and S. Yan, “Trace ratio criterion
for feature selection,” in Proc. Conf. Artif. Intell. (AAAI), vol. 2, 2008,
pp. 671–676.
[33] A. Vergara, S. Vembu, T. Ayhan, M. A. Ryan, M. L. Homer, and
R. Huerta, “Chemical gas sensor drift compensation using classifier
ensembles,” Sens. Actuators B, Chem., vols. 166–167, pp. 320–329,
May 2012.
[34] G.-B. Huang and H. A. Babri, “Upper bounds on the number of hidden
neurons in feedforward networks with arbitrary bounded nonlinear acti-
vation functions,” IEEE Trans. Neural Netw., vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 224–229,
Jan. 1998.
Leilei Zhao received the B.S. degree from the
Academy of Mathematics and Statistics, Zhengzhou
University, Zhengzhou, China, in 2016. He is cur-
rently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the School of
Microelectronics and Communication Engineering,
Chongqing University, Chongqing, China.
His research interests include electronic nose and
machine learning.
Junhui Qian (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D.
degree in signal and information processing from the
University of Electronic Science and Technology of
China, Chengdu, China, in 2018.
From 2016 to 2017, he was a Visiting Graduate
Researcher with the Electrical Engineering Depart-
ment, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
He is currently a Lecturer with Chongqing Uni-
versity, Chongqing, China. His current research
interests include signal processing for MIMO radar
and communicate on systems, artificial olfaction
(electronic nose), and biomedical and modern signal processing technology.
 ZHAO et al.: WDELM DESIGN FOR LUNG CANCER DETECTION BY ELECTRONIC NOSE SYSTEM 2509709

Fengchun Tian (Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. Shuya Zhang received the bachelor’s degree in
degree in radio engineering, the M.Sc. degree in electronic information engineering from Hunan Uni-
biomedical instruments and engineering, and the versity, Changsha, China, in 2018. She is currently
Ph.D. degree in theoretical electric engineering from pursuing the M.Sc. degree with Chongqing Univer-
Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, in 1984, sity, Chongqing, China.
1986, and 1996, respectively. Her research interests include electronic nose and
Since 1984, he has been working as a Teacher with machine learning algorithm.
Chongqing University. Since 2001, he has been a
Professor with Chongqing University. Since 2007,
he has also been an Adjunct Professor with the
University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada. He is
currently the Director of the Chongqing Key Laboratory of Bio-Perception &
Intelligent Information Processing, Chongqing. His research interests include
artificial olfaction (electronic nose), image processing, and biomedical and
modern signal processing technology.

Ran Liu received the B.E., M.E., and D.E.

degrees in computer science from Chongqing Uni-
versity, Chongqing, China, in 2001, 2004, and 2007,
respectively.
He worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher with
Homwee Technology Company Ltd., Chengdu,
China, from 2008 to 2010. From 2015 to 2016,
he was a Research Fellow with the Department
of Ophthalmology, Schepens Eye Research Insti-
tute, Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical
School, Boston, MA, USA. He is currently an Asso-
ciate Professor with the College of Communication Engineering, Chongqing
University, and the College of Computer Science, Chongqing University.
His research interests include image processing, machine learning, machine
olfaction, and 3-D imaging.

Bei Liu received the M.Sc. degree in signal and
information processing from Southwest University,
Chongqing, China, in 2013. She is currently pursu-
ing the Ph.D. degree with the School of Microelec-
tronics and Communication Engineering, Chongqing
University, Chongqing.
Her research interests include electronic nose tech-
nology and machine learning algorithm.
Mengchen Lu received the bachelor’s degree from
the Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou,
China, in 2019. She is currently pursuing the M.S.
degree in information and communication engineer-
ing with Chongqing University, Chongqing, China.
Her research interests include electronic noses and
intelligent information processing.

Authorized licensed use limited to: Khulna Univ of Engineering & Technology - KUET. Downloaded on April 17,2024 at 15:48:43 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.