Firefly-SVM predictive model for breast cancer subgroup classification with clinicopathological parameters

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is a highly predominant destructive disease among women characterised with varied tumour biology, molecular subgroups and diverse clinicopathological specifications. The potentiality of machine learning to transform complex medical data into meaningful knowledge has led to its application in breast cancer detection and prognostic evaluation. OBJECTIVE: The emergence of data-driven diagnostic model for assisting clinicians in diagnostic decision making has gained an increasing curiosity in breast cancer identification and analysis. This motivated us to develop a breast cancer data-driven model for subtype classification more accurately. METHOD: In this article, we proposed a firefly-support vector machine (SVM) breast cancer predictive model that uses clinicopathological and demographic data gathered from various tertiary care cancer hospitals or oncological centres to distinguish between patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and non-triple-negative breast cancer (non-TNBC). RESULTS: The results of the firefly-support vector machine (firefly-SVM) predictive model were distinguished from the traditional grid search-support vector machine (Grid-SVM) model, particle swarm optimisation-support vector machine (PSO-SVM) and genetic algorithm-support vector machine (GA-SVM) hybrid models through hyperparameter tuning. The findings show that the recommended firefly-SVM classification model outperformed other existing models in terms of prediction accuracy (93.4%, 86.6%, 69.6%) for automated SVM parameter selection. The effectiveness of the prediction model was also evaluated using well-known metrics, such as the F1-score, mean square error, area under the ROC curve, logarithmic loss and precision–recall curve. CONCLUSION: Firefly-SVM predictive model may be treated as an alternate tool for breast cancer subgroup classification that would benefit the clinicians for managing the patient with proper treatment and diagnostic outcome.