An intelligent ensemble classification method based on multi-layer perceptron neural network and evolutionary algorithms for breast cancer diagnosis

ABSTRACT Nowadays, breast cancer is one of the leading causes of women’s death in the world. If breast cancer is detected at the initial stages, it can ensure long-term survival. Numerous methods have been proposed for the early prediction of such cancer. However, efforts are still ongoing, given the importance of the problem. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are a prevalent machine learning algorithm, which is very popular for prediction and classification problems. In this paper, an Intelligent Ensemble Classification method based on Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network (IEC-MLP) is proposed for breast cancer diagnosis. The proposed method consists of two stages: parameters optimisation and ensemble classification. In the first stage, the MLP Neural Network (MLP-NN) parameters, including optimal features, hidden layers, hidden nodes and weights, are optimised with the help of an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA), aiming at maximising the classification accuracy. In the second stage, an ensemble classification algorithm of MLP-NN with optimised parameters is applied to classify the patients. Our proposed IEC-MLP method not only reduces the complexity of MLP-NN and effectively selects the optimal subset of features but also minimises the misclassification cost. The classification results have been evaluated using the IEC-MLP over different breast cancer datasets, and the prediction results have been auspicious (98.74% accuracy on the WBCD dataset). It is noteworthy that the proposed method outperforms the GAANN and CAFS algorithms and other state-of-the-art classifiers. In addition, IEC-MLP is also capable of being employed in diagnosing other cancer types.