Breast cancer diagnosis based on feature extraction using a hybrid of K-means and support vector machine algorithms

• Malignant and benign tumor abstract patterns are explored by K-SVM respectively.
• Similarities of tumors and abstract patterns is used for prediction model training.
• K-SVM reduces feature space dimensions significantly.
• Based on the WDBC dataset, the prediction model accuracy was at 97.38% by K-SVM.
• K-SVM saves the training time dramatically without losing prediction accuracy.

With the development of clinical technologies, different tumor features have been collected for breast cancer diagnosis. Filtering all the pertinent feature information to support the clinical disease diagnosis is a challenging and time consuming task. The objective of this research is to diagnose breast cancer based on the extracted tumor features. Feature extraction and selection are critical to the quality of classifiers founded through data mining methods. To extract useful information and diagnose the tumor, a hybrid of K-means and support vector machine (K-SVM) algorithms is developed. The K-means algorithm is utilized to recognize the hidden patterns of the benign and malignant tumors separately. The membership of each tumor to these patterns is calculated and treated as a new feature in the training model. Then, a support vector machine (SVM) is used to obtain the new classifier to differentiate the incoming tumors. Based on 10-fold cross validation, the proposed methodology improves the accuracy to 97.38%, when tested on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) data set from the University of California – Irvine machine learning repository. Six abstract tumor features are extracted from the 32 original features for the training phase. The results not only illustrate the capability of the proposed approach on breast cancer diagnosis, but also shows time savings during the training phase. Physicians can also benefit from the mined abstract tumor features by better understanding the properties of different types of tumors.