A Breast Cancer Diagnosis Method Based on VIM Feature Selection and Hierarchical Clustering Random Forest Algorithm

Breast cancer is a neoplastic disease which seriously threatens women’s health. It is regard as the most common cause of cancer death in women. Accurate detection and effective treatment are of vital significance to lower the death rate of breast cancer. In recent years, machine learning technique has been considered to be an effective method for accurate diagnosis of various diseases, among which Random Forest (RF) has been widely applied. However, decision trees with poor classification performance and high similarity may be generated during the training process, which affects the overall classification performance of the model. In this paper, a Hierarchical Clustering Random Forest (HCRF) model is developed. By measuring the similarity among all the decision trees, the hierarchical clustering technique is used to carry out clustering analysis on decision trees. The representative trees are selected from divided clusters to construct the hierarchical clustering random forest with low similarity and high accuracy. In addition, we use Variable Importance Measure (VIM) method to optimize the selected feature number for the breast cancer prediction. Wisconsin Diagnosis Breast Cancer (WDBC) database and Wisconsin Breast Cancer (WBC) database from the UCI (University of California Irvine) Machine Learning repository are employed in this study. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by utilizing accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity and AUC (Area Under ROC Curve). Experimental results indicate that the classification based on HCRF algorithm with VIM as a feature selection method reaches the best accuracy of 97.05% and 97.76% compared to Decision Tree, Adaboost and Random Forest on both the WDBC and WBC datasets. The method proposed in this study is an effective tool for diagnosing breast cancer.