Accurate breast cancer diagnosis using a stable feature ranking algorithm

Abstract

Background Breast cancer (BC) is one of the most common cancers among women. Since diverse features can be collected, how to stably select the powerful ones for accurate BC diagnosis remains challenging. Methods A hybrid framework is designed for successively investigating both feature ranking (FR) stability and cancer diagnosis effectiveness. Specifically, on 4 BC datasets (BCDR-F03, WDBC, GSE10810 and GSE15852), the stability of 23 FR algorithms is evaluated via an advanced estimator (S), and the predictive power of the stable feature ranks is further tested by using different machine learning classifiers. Results Experimental results identify 3 algorithms achieving good stability ($$S \ge 0.55$$ S ≥ 0.55 ) on the four datasets and generalized Fisher score (GFS) leading to state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, GFS ranks suggest that shape features are crucial in BC image analysis (BCDR-F03 and WDBC) and that using a few genes can well differentiate benign and malignant tumor cases (GSE10810 and GSE15852). Conclusions The proposed framework recognizes a stable FR algorithm for accurate BC diagnosis. Stable and effective features could deepen the understanding of BC diagnosis and related decision-making applications.