Advanced Machine Learning Techniques for Prognostic Analysis in Breast Cancer
Authors: Puttegowda Kiran , D Anil Kumar , Ravi Vinaykumar , Veeraprathap V , Ravi Pradeep , Yathiraj G R , D S Sunil Kumar 
Published: February 2025

Aims

The aim of this research is mainly to use machine learning methods for forecasting significant characteristics related to breast cancer using the data to facilitate diagnosis and treatment accordingly. Such factors include the progesterone receptor status (PR+), a biomarker that helps in the understanding of the hormone receptor status of breast cancer cells, and PR status has specific prognostic value for the effectiveness of hormone therapies. Also, in the study, it is essential to predict a tumor stage, which is one of the more significant factors to determine cancer progression and treatment plan. Another focus is the prediction of the OncoTree Code, a hierarchical taxonomy that gives even more information about the type of breast cancer and presents the possibility of individually tailored treatments. To achieve these objectives, this study uses sophisticated classification and regression algorithms like Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest and Logistic Regression. These models are implemented on the METABRIC dataset, a large-scale genomic and clinical model, to capture trends and generate precise forecasts to advance knowledge of breast cancer traits and enhance patient care.

Background

Breast cancer is the most prevalent type of cancer among women, originating in the cells of breast tissue and potentially spreading to other parts of the body, damaging surrounding tissues. Significant advancements in breast cancer research, increased funding, and heightened awareness have greatly improved early diagnosis and treatment, contributing to higher survival rates and reduced fatalities.

Objective

This research proposes the following objectives: The main objective of the study is to leverage the analysis of the METABRIC dataset to improve the prospects of personalized medicine in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. Due to the availability of genomic and clinical data on METABRIC, this study aims to identify important characteristics and biomarkers in the development of tailored therapy. This work’s investigation objectives include PR+ status, tumor stage and OncoTree Code-defined cancer subtypes. Applying machine learning methods, such as SVM, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression, this research intends to find significant associations and establish a premise for enhancing patient prognosis and the accuracy of cancer therapy.

Methods

The METABRIC data set is used in the analysis to identify fundamental factors, including the progesterone receptor status, cancer stage and cancer type (OncoTree Code). This is done with the help of such machine learning algorithms as SVM, Random Forest, Logistic Regression that allow for correct modeling and deriving insights of these clinical parameters.

Results

In the proposed breast cancer classification work, higher accuracy was observed from several classifiers as per the machine learning classifiers used in the project. Among the classifiers, the classical quadratic classifier known as the Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a radial basis function (RBF) leading to a high accuracy of 99.79% when the regularization parameter (C) is at 0.001, demonstrates the effectiveness of the classifier compared to others in capturing Non-Linear patterns within the data set. The linear SVM was also very effective, achieving an accuracy of 97.93% and also demonstrating the ability to classify the data with simpler decision boundaries. Likewise, the Random Forest classifier, having high accuracy and an ensemble-based approach, expects much high strength, especially in handling the complex data and got the accuracy of 97.59%, which again proved this strength of the Random Forest classifier. However, the Logistic Regression, a simpler linear model, gave a slightly lower accuracy of 89.45%, maybe because this model does not have the ability to capture nonlinear relationships. This study also emphasizes the importance of choosing the right classifiers and setting hyperparameters that will fit the characteristics of this type of database to obtain the best performance of the classifiers. The study successfully leverages the data from the METABRIC dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of different machine-learning models in predicting these key cancer-related factors.

Conclusion

This research contributes to the field of personalized medicine by providing objective findings on breast cancer detection and therapy. It will use the most advanced machine learning methods and the rich METABRIC data to improve the prediction of key diagnostic parameters and factors, including hormone receptor status, tumor stage and cancer subtype. These enhancements in predictive precision enable the examination of the malignant neoplasms at an earlier stage and help to design individualized treatment regimens that might be closely related to the general clinical phenotypes of the patient. Thus, this research can contribute to the delivery of better patient care through better therapeutic targets and approaches that are specific to the breast cancer context.