Diagnosing breast cancer with an improved artificial immune recognition system

Breast cancer is the top cancer in women worldwide. Scientists are looking for early detection strategies which remain the cornerstone of breast cancer control. Consequently, there is a need to develop an expert system that helps medical professionals to accurately diagnose this disease. Artificial immune recognition system (AIRS) has been used successfully for diagnosing various diseases. However, little effort has been undertaken to improve its classification accuracy. To increase the classification accuracy, this study introduces a new hybrid system that incorporates support vector machine, fuzzy logic, and real tournament selection mechanism into AIRS. The Wisconsin Breast Cancer data set was used as the benchmark data set; it is available through the machine learning repository of the University of California at Irvine. The classification performance was measured through tenfold cross-validation, student's t test, sensitivity and specificity. With an accuracy of 100 %, the proposed method was able to classify breast cancer dataset successfully.