Prediction model building and feature selection with support vector machines in breast cancer diagnosis

Breast cancer is a serious problem for the young women of Taiwan. Some medical researches have proved that DNA viruses are one of the high-risk factors closely related to human cancers. Five DNA viruses are studied in this research: specific types of HSV-1 (herpes simplex virus type 1), EBV (Epstein-Barr virus), CMV (cytomegalovirus), HPV (human papillomavirus), and HHV-8 (human herpesvirus-8). The purposes of this study are to obtain the bioinformatics about breast tumor and DNA viruses, and to build an accurate diagnosis model about breast cancer and fibroadenoma. Research efforts have reported with increasing confirmation that the support vector machine (SVM) has a greater accurate diagnosis ability. Therefore, this study constructs a hybrid SVM-based strategy with feature selection to render a diagnosis between the breast cancer and fibroadenoma and to find the important risk factor for breast cancer. The results show that {HSV-1, HHV-8} or {HSV-1, HHV-8, CMV} are the most important features and that the diagnosis model achieved high classification accuracy, at 86% of average overall hit rate. A Linear discriminate analysis (LDA) diagnosis model is also constructed in this study. The LDA model shows that {HSV-1, HHV-8, EBV} or {HSV-1, HHV-8} are significant factors which are similar to that of the SVM-based classifier. However, the classificatory accuracy of the SVM-based classifier is slightly better than that of LDA in the negative hit ratio, positive hit ratio, and overall hit ratio.