A study on prediction of breast cancer recurrence using data mining techniques

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and thus the early stage detection in breast cancer can provide potential advantage in the treatment of this disease. Early treatment not only helps to cure cancer but also helps in its prevention of its recurrence. Data mining algorithms can provide great assistance in prediction of earl y stage breast cancer that always has been a challenging research problem. The main objective of this research is to find how precisely can these data mining algorithms predict the probability of recurrence of the disease among the patients on the basis of important stated parameters. The research highlights the performance of different clustering and classification algorithms on the dataset. Experiments show that classification algorithms are better predictors than clustering algorithms. The result indicates that the decision tree (C5.0) and SVM is the best predictor with 81% accuracy on the holdout sample and fuzzy c-means came with the lowest accuracy of37% among the algorithms used in this paper.