On Breast Cancer Detection: An Application of Machine Learning Algorithms on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Dataset

This paper presents a comparison of six machine learning (ML) algorithms: GRU-SVM[1], Linear Regression, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Nearest Neighbor (NN) search, Softmax Regression, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset[2] by measuring their classification test accuracy, and their sensitivity and specificity values. The said dataset consists of features which were computed from digitized images of FNA tests on a breast mass[2]. For the implementation of the ML algorithms, the dataset was partitioned in the following fashion: 70% for training phase, and 30% for the testing phase. The hyper-parameters used for all the classifiers were manually assigned. Results show that all the presented ML algorithms performed well (all exceeded 90% test accuracy) on the classification task. The MLP algorithm stands out among the implemented algorithms with a test accuracy of approximate to 99.04%.