Ensemble Case based Reasoning Imputation in Breast Cancer Classification

Abstract

Missing Data (MD) is a common drawback that affects breast cancer classification. Thus, handling missing data is primordial before building any breast cancer classifier. This paper presents the impact of using ensemble Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) imputation on breast cancer classification. Thereafter, we evaluated the influence of CBR using parameter tuning and ensemble CBR (E-CBR) with three missingness mechanisms (MCAR: missing completely at random, MAR: missing at random and NMAR: not missing at random) and nine percentages (10% to 90%) on the accuracy rates of five classifiers: Decision trees, Random forest, K-nearest neighbor, Support vector machine and Multi-layer perceptron over two Wisconsin breast cancer datasets. All experiments were implemented using Weka JAVA API code 3.8; SPSS v20 was used for statistical tests. The findings confirmed that E-CBR yields to better results compared to CBR for the five classifiers. The MD percentage affects negatively the classifier performance: as the MD percentage increases, the accuracy rates of the classifier decrease regardless the MD mechanism and technique. RF with E-CBR outperformed all the other combinations (MD technique, classifier) with 89.72% for MCAR, 87.08% for MAR and 86.84% for NMAR.