An Explainable Artificial Intelligence Model for the Classification of Breast Cancer

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women and globally affects both genders. The disease arises due to abnormal growth of tissue formed of malignant cells. Early detection of breast cancer is crucial for enhancing the survival rate. Therefore, artificial intelligence has revolutionized healthcare and can serve as a promising tool for early diagnosis. The present study aims to develop a machine-learning model to classify breast cancer and to provide explanations for the model results. This could improve the understanding of the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer by identifying the most important features of breast cancer tumors and the way they affect the classification task. The best-performing machine-learning model has achieved an accuracy of 97.7% using k-nearest neighbors and a precision of 98.2% based on the Wisconsin breast cancer dataset and an accuracy of 98.6% using the artificial neural network with 94.4% precision based on the Wisconsin diagnostic breast cancer dataset. Hence, this asserts the importance and effectiveness of the proposed approach. The present research explains the model behavior using model-agnostic methods, demonstrating that the bare nuclei feature in the Wisconsin breast cancer dataset and the area’s worst feature Wisconsin diagnostic breast cancer dataset are the most important factors in determining breast cancer malignancy. The work provides extensive insights into the particular characteristics of the diagnosis of breast cancer and suggests possible directions for expected investigation in the future into the fundamental biological mechanisms that underlie the disease’s onset. The findings underline the potential of machine learning to enhance breast cancer diagnosis and therapy planning while emphasizing the importance of interpretability and transparency in artificial intelligence-based healthcare systems.

Keywords

• Artificial intelligence
• breast cancer
• explainable machine learning
• model-agnostic
• permutation importance
• partial dependence plot