A Comparative Analysis of Data Mining Techniques on Breast Cancer Diagnosis Data using WEKA Toolbox

Breast cancer is considered the second most common cancer in women compared to all other cancers. It is fatal in less than half of all cases and is the main cause of mortality in women. It accounts for 16% of all cancer mortalities worldwide. Early diagnosis of breast cancer increases the chance of recovery. Data mining techniques can be utilized in the early diagnosis of breast cancer. In this paper, an academic experimental breast cancer dataset is used to perform a data mining practical experiment using the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) tool. The WEKA Java application represents a rich resource for conducting performance metrics during the execution of experiments. Pre-processing and feature extraction are used to optimize the data. The classification process used in this study was summarized through thirteen experiments. Additionally, 10 experiments using various different classification algorithms were conducted. The introduced algorithms were: Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Lazy IBK (Instance-Bases learning with parameter K), Lazy Kstar, Lazy Locally Weighted Learner, Rules ZeroR, Decision Stump, Decision Trees J48, Random Forest and Random Trees. The process of producing a predictive model was automated with the use of classification accuracy. Further, several experiments on classification of Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer and Wisconsin Breast Cancer, were conducted to compare the success rates of the different methods. Results conclude that Lazy IBK classifier k-NN can achieve 98% accuracy among other classifiers. The main advantages of the study were the compactness of using 13 different data mining models and 10 different performance measurements, and plotting figures of classifications errors.