Analysis of cancer data: A data mining approach

Even though cancer research has traditionally been clinical and biological in nature, in recent years data driven analytic studies have become a common complement. In medical domains where data and analytics driven research is successfully applied, new and novel research directions are identified to further advance the clinical and biological studies. In this research, we used three popular data mining techniques (decision trees, artificial neural networks and support vector machines) along with the most commonly used statistical analysis technique logistic regression to develop prediction models for prostate cancer survivability. The data set contained around 120 000 records and 77 variables. A k-fold cross-validation methodology was used in model building, evaluation and comparison. The results showed that support vector machines are the most accurate predictor (with a test set accuracy of 92.85%) for this domain, followed by artificial neural networks and decision trees.