Title: On using the wisdom of the crowd principles in classification, application on breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis

Authors: Merouane Amraoui; Tarik Boudghene Stambouli; Belal Alshaqaqi

Addresses: Laboratoire Signaux et Images, Faculté de Génie Electrique, Département d'Electroniques, Université de Science et Technologie Oran MB, Oran, Algeria ' Laboratoire Signaux et Images, Département d'Electroniques, Faculté de Génie Electrique, Université de Science et Technologie Oran MB, Oran, Algeria ' Laboratoire Signaux et Images, Département d'Electroniques, Faculté de Génie Electrique, Université de Science et Technologie Oran MB, Oran, Algeria

Abstract: Breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis are an oblique processes, where errors can be fatal, it is done by experts only. Therefore, researchers are using the promising potentials of classification algorithms to detect malignant and benign tumours. Classification techniques vary widely, from individual classifiers such as rules, trees and functions to ensemble classifiers that combine serval classification algorithms. In this paper, we examine the use of wisdom of crowds' principles in classification of breast cancer for diagnosis and prognosis. We use four well-known datasets and run a collection of 53 algorithms combined with majority voting to simulate the wisdom of crowds. Furthermore, we report the results obtained from all of 53 algorithms executed individually on all four datasets. Therefore, this article can be perceived as a review for these classification methods as well. Moreover, we compare the results obtained from applying majority voting using the best five classifiers, to those obtained by applying the wisdom of the crowds' principles. The results will show that outcome of having too many classifiers reduces the accuracy dramatically. Consequently, it is not advisable to use more than five strong classifiers.

Keywords: BCD; breast cancer; classification; diagnosis; majority voting; prognosis; WDBC; Weka; Wisconsin; wisdom of the crowd; WPBC.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2019.103784

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2019 Vol.15 No.4, pp.324 - 346

Received: 04 Oct 2016
Accepted: 03 Sep 2017
Published online: 29 Nov 2019 *

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