Infusing Weighted Average Ensemble Diversity for Advanced Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

Breast cancer is a widespread health threat for women globally, often difficult to detect early due to its asymptomatic nature. As the disease advances, treatment becomes intricate and costly, ultimately resulting in elevated fatality rates. Currently, despite the widespread use of advanced machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques, a comprehensive diagnosis of breast cancer remains elusive. Most of the existing methods primarily utilize either attention‐based deep models or models based on handcrafted features to capture and gather local details. However, both of these approaches lack the capability to offer essential local information for precise tumor detection. Additionally, the available breast cancer datasets suffer from class imbalance issue. Hence, this paper presents a novel weighted average ensemble network (WA‐ENet) designed for early‐stage breast cancer detection that leverages the ability of ensemble technique over single classifier‐based models for more robust and accurate prediction. The proposed model employs a weighted average‐based ensemble technique, combining predictions from three diverse classifiers. The optimal combination of weights is determined using the hill climbing (HC) algorithm. Moreover, the proposed model enhances overall system performance by integrating deep features and handcrafted features through the use of HOG, thereby providing precise local information. Additionally, the proposed work addresses class imbalance by incorporating borderline synthetic minority over‐sampling technique (BSMOTE). It achieves 99.65% accuracy on BUSI and 97.48% on UDIAT datasets.