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Decision tree classifiers for automated medical diagnosis

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Abstract

Decision support systems help physicians and also play an important role in medical decision-making. They are based on different models, and the best of them are providing an explanation together with an accurate, reliable and quick response. This paper presents a decision support tool for the detection of breast cancer based on three types of decision tree classifiers. They are single decision tree (SDT), boosted decision tree (BDT) and decision tree forest (DTF). Decision tree classification provides a rapid and effective method of categorizing data sets. Decision-making is performed in two stages: training the classifiers with features from Wisconsin breast cancer data set, and then testing. The performance of the proposed structure is evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, confusion matrix and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The results showed that the overall accuracies of SDT and BDT in the training phase achieved 97.07 % with 429 correct classifications and 98.83 % with 437 correct classifications, respectively. BDT performed better than SDT for all performance indices than SDT. Value of ROC and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) for BDT in the training phase achieved 0.99971 and 0.9746, respectively, which was superior to SDT classifier. During validation phase, DTF achieved 97.51 %, which was superior to SDT (95.75 %) and BDT (97.07 %) classifiers. Value of ROC and MCC for DTF achieved 0.99382 and 0.9462, respectively. BDT showed the best performance in terms of sensitivity, and SDT was the best only considering speed.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to highly appreciate and gratefully acknowledge Phillip H. Sherrod, software developer and consultant on predictive modeling, for his support and consultation during modeling process.

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  1. Faculty of Engineering, Misr University for Science and Technology (MUST), 6th of October City, Egypt

    Ahmad Taher Azar

  2. Systems and Biomedical Engineering Department, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt

    Shereen M. El-Metwally

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  1. Ahmad Taher Azar
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Correspondence to Ahmad Taher Azar.

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Azar, A.T., El-Metwally, S.M. Decision tree classifiers for automated medical diagnosis. Neural Comput & Applic 23, 2387–2403 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-012-1196-7

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