A fuzzy-genetic approach to breast cancer diagnosis

The automatic diagnosis of breast cancer is an important, real-world medical problem. In this paper we focus on the Wisconsin breast cancer diagnosis (WBCD) problem, combining two methodologies-fuzzy systems and evolutionary algorithms-so as to automatically produce diagnostic systems. We find that our fuzzy-genetic approach produces systems exhibiting two grime characteristics: first, they attain high classification performance (the best shown to date), with the possibility of attributing a confidence measure to the output diagnosis; second, the resulting systems involve a few simple rules. and are therefore (human-) interpretable. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.