A Machine Learning Method for Classification of Cervical Cancer

Abstract

Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of premature mortality among women worldwide and more than 85% of these deaths are in developing countries. There are several risk factors associated with cervical cancer. In this paper, we developed a predictive model for predicting the outcome of patients with cervical cancer, given risk patterns from individual medical records and preliminary screening. This work presents a decision tree (DT) classification algorithm to analyze the risk factors of cervical cancer. Recursive feature elimination (RFE) and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) feature selection techniques were fully explored to determine the most important attributes for cervical cancer prediction. The dataset employed here contains missing values and is highly imbalanced. Therefore, a combination of under and oversampling techniques called SMOTETomek was employed. A comparative analysis of the proposed model has been performed to show the effectiveness of feature selection and class imbalance based on the classifier’s accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. The DT with the selected features from RFE and SMOTETomek has better results with an accuracy of 98.72% and sensitivity of 100%. DT classifier is shown to have better performance in handling classification problems when the features are reduced, and the problem of high class imbalance is addressed.