Breast cancer classification using a novel hybrid feature selection approach

Many women around the world die due to breast cancer. If breast cancer is treated in the early phase, mortality rates may significantly be reduced. Quite a number of approaches have been proposed to help in the early detection of breast cancer. A novel hybrid feature selection model is suggested in this study. This novel hybrid model aims to build an efficient feature selection method and successfully classify breast lesions. A combination of relief and binary Harris hawk optimization (BHHO) hybrid model is used for feature selection. Then, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR) and naive Bayes (NB) methods are preferred for the classification task. The suggested hybrid model is tested by three different breast cancer datasets which are Wisconsin diagnostic breast cancer dataset (WDBC), Wisconsin breast cancer dataset (WBCD) and mammographic breast cancer dataset (MBCD). According to the experimental results, the relief and BHHO hybrid model improves the performance of all classification algorithms in all three datasets. For WDBC, relief-BHO-SVM model shows the highest classification rates with an of accuracy of 98.77%, precision of 97.17%, recall of 99.52%, F1-score of 98.33%, specificity of 99.72% and balanced accuracy of 99.62%. For WBCD, relief-BHO-SVM model achieves of accuracy of 99.28%, precision of 98.76%, recall of 99.17%, F1-score of 98.96%, specificity of 99.56% and balanced accuracy of 99.36%. Relief-BHO-SVM model performs the best with an accuracy of 97.44%, precision of 97.41%, recall of 98.26%, F1-score of 97.84%, specificity of 97.47% and balanced accuracy of 97.86% for MBCD. Furthermore, the relief-BHO-SVM model has achieved better results than other known approaches. Compared with recent studies on breast cancer classification, the suggested hybrid method has achieved quite good results.