Reviewing ensemble classification methods in breast cancer

Ensemble methods consist of combining more than one single technique to solve the same task. This approach was designed to overcome the weaknesses of single techniques and consolidate their strengths. Ensemble methods are now widely used to carry out prediction tasks (e.g. classification and regression) in several fields, including that of bioinformatics. Researchers have particularly begun to employ ensemble techniques to improve research into breast cancer, as this is the most frequent type of cancer and accounts for most of the deaths among women.

The goal of this study is to analyse the state of the art in ensemble classification methods when applied to breast cancer as regards 9 aspects: publication venues, medical tasks tackled, empirical and research types adopted, types of ensembles proposed, single techniques used to construct the ensembles, validation framework adopted to evaluate the proposed ensembles, tools used to build the ensembles, and optimization methods used for the single techniques. This paper was undertaken as a systematic mapping study.

A total of 193 papers that were published from the year 2000 onwards, were selected from four online databases: IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library, Scopus and PubMed. This study found that of the six medical tasks that exist, the diagnosis medical task was that most frequently researched, and that the experiment-based empirical type and evaluation-based research type were the most dominant approaches adopted in the selected studies. The homogeneous type was that most widely used to perform the classification task. With regard to single techniques, this mapping study found that decision trees, support vector machines and artificial neural networks were those most frequently adopted to build ensemble classifiers. In the case of the evaluation framework, the Wisconsin Breast Cancer dataset was the most frequently used by researchers to perform their experiments, while the most noticeable validation method was k-fold cross-validation. Several tools are available to perform experiments related to ensemble classification methods, such as Weka and R Software. Few researchers took into account the optimisation of the single technique of which their proposed ensemble was composed, while the grid search method was that most frequently adopted to tune the parameter settings of a single classifier.

This paper reports an in-depth study of the application of ensemble methods as regards breast cancer. Our results show that there are several gaps and issues and we, therefore, provide researchers in the field of breast cancer research with recommendations. Moreover, after analysing the papers found in this systematic mapping study, we discovered that the majority report positive results concerning the accuracy of ensemble classifiers when compared to the single classifiers. In order to aggregate the evidence reported in literature, it will, therefore, be necessary to perform a systematic literature review and meta-analysis in which an in-depth analysis could be conducted so as to confirm the superiority of ensemble classifiers over the classical techniques.