Breast cancer relapse disease prediction improvements with ensemble learning approaches

Abstract

Diagnosis and prognosis are especially difficult areas of medical research related to cancer due to the high incidence of breast cancer, which has surpassed all other cancers in terms of female mortality. Another factor that has a substantial influence on the quality of life of cancer patients is the fear that they may experience a relapse of their disease. The objective of the study is to give medical practitioners a more effective strategy for using ensemble learning techniques to forecast when breast cancer may recur. This research aimed to investigate the usage of deep neural networks (DNNs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) in addition to machine learning (ML) based approaches, including bagging, averaging, and voting, to enhance the efficacy of breast cancer relapse diagnosis on two breast cancer relapse datasets. Results from the empirical study demonstrate that the proposed ensemble learning-enabled approach improves accuracies by 96.31% and 95.81%, precisions by 96.70% and 96.15%, sensitivities by 98.88% and 98.68%, specificities by 84.62% in both, F1-scores by 97.78% and 97.40%, and area under the curve (AUCs) of 0.987 and 0.978, with University Medical Centre, Institute of Oncology (UMCIO) and Wisconsin prognostic breast cancer (WPBC) datasets respectively. Consequently, these improved disease outcomes may encourage physicians to use this model to make better treatment choices.