An improved cuckoo search based extreme learning machine for medical data classification

•Medical data are classified using several cuckoo search (CS) based ELM variants.•Three benchmark medical data are analyzed using several performance metrics.•For better accuracy in classification cuckoo search algorithm is improved.•The improved CS based ELM requires less number of hidden layer neurons.

Machine learning techniques are being increasingly used for detection and diagnosis of diseases for its accuracy and efficiency in pattern classification. In this paper, improved cuckoo search based extreme learning machine (ICSELM) is proposed to classify binary medical datasets. Extreme learning machine (ELM) is widely used as a learning algorithm for training single layer feed forward neural networks (SLFN) in the field of classification. However, to make the model more stable, an evolutionary algorithm improved cuckoo search (ICS) is used to pre-train ELM by selecting the input weights and hidden biases. Like ELM, Moore–Penrose (MP) generalized inverse is used in ICSELM to analytically determines the output weights. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, four benchmark datasets, i.e. Breast Cancer, Diabetes, Bupa and Hepatitis from the UCI Repository of Machine Learning are used. A number of useful performance evaluation measures including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, confusion matrix, Gmean, F-score and norm of the output weights as well as the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve are computed. The results are analyzed and compared with both ELM based models like ELM, on-line sequential extreme learning algorithm (OSELM), CSELM and other artificial neural networks i.e. multi-layered perceptron (MLP), MLPCS, MLPICS and radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), RBFNNCS, RBFNNICS. The experimental results demonstrate that the ICSELM model outperforms other models.