A GAs based approach for mining breast cancer pattern

Data mining usually means the methodologies and tools for the efficient new knowledge discovery from databases. In this paper, a genetic algorithms (GAs) based approach to assess breast cancer pattern is proposed for extracting the decision rules including the predictors, the corresponding inequality and threshold values simultaneously so as to building a decision-making model with maximum prediction accuracy. Early many studies of handling the breast cancer diagnostic problems used the statistical related techniques. As the diagnosis of breast cancer is highly nonlinear in nature, it is hard to develop a comprehensive model taking into account all the independent variables using conventional statistical approaches. Recently, numerous studies have demonstrated that neural networks (NNs) are more reliable than the traditional statistical approaches and the dynamic stress method. The usefulness of using NNs have been reported in literatures but the most obstacle is the in the building and using the model in which the classification rules are hard to be realized. We compared our results against a commercial data mining software, and we show experimentally that the proposed rule extraction approach is promising for improving prediction accuracy and enhancing the modeling simplicity. In particular, our approach is capable of extracting rules which can be developed as a computer model for prediction or classification of breast cancer potential like expert systems. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.