A novel discrete learning-based intelligent methodology for breast cancer classification purposes

Classification is one of the most significant subfields of data mining that has been successfully applied to various applications. The literature has expended substantial effort to present more efficient and accurate classification models. Despite the diversity of the proposed models, they were all created using the same methodology, and their learning processes ignored a fundamental issue. In all existing classification model learning processes, a continuous distance-based cost function is optimized to estimate the unknown parameters. The classification problem's objective function is discrete. Consequently, applying a continuous cost function to a classification problem with a discrete objective function is illogical or inefficient. This paper proposes a novel classification methodology utilizing a discrete cost function in the learning process. To this end, one of the most popular intelligent classification models, the multilayer perceptron (MLP), is used to implement the proposed methodology. Theoretically, the classification performance of the proposed discrete learning-based MLP (DIMLP) model is not dissimilar to that of its continuous learning-based counterpart. Nevertheless, in this study, to demonstrate the efficacy of the DIMLP model, it was applied to several breast cancer classification datasets, and its classification rate was compared to that of the conventional continuous learning-based MLP model. The empirical results indicate that the proposed DIMLP model outperforms the MLP model across all datasets. The results demonstrate that the presented DIMLP classification model achieves an average classification rate of 94.70 %, a 6.95 % improvement over the classification rate of the traditional MLP model, which was 88.54 %. Therefore, the classification approach proposed in this study can be utilized as an alternative learning process in intelligent classification methods for medical decision-making and other classification applications, particularly when more accurate results are required.