Informed Attentive Predictors: A Generalisable Architecture for Prior Knowledge-Based Assisted Diagnosis of Cancers

Due to the high mortality of many cancers and their related diseases, the prediction and prognosis techniques of cancers are being extensively studied to assist doctors in making diagnoses. Many machine-learning-based cancer predictors have been put forward, but many of them have failed to become widely utilised due to some crucial problems. For example, most methods require too much training data, which is not always applicable to institutes, and the complicated genetic mutual effects of cancers are generally ignored in many proposed methods. Moreover, a majority of these assist models are actually not safe to use, as they are generally built on black-box machine learners that lack references from related field knowledge. We observe that few machine-learning-based cancer predictors are capable of employing prior knowledge (PrK) to mitigate these issues. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a generalisable informed machine learning architecture named the Informed Attentive Predictor (IAP) to make PrK available to the predictor’s decision-making phases and apply it to the field of cancer prediction. Specifically, we make several implementations of the IAP and evaluate its performance on six TCGA datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our architecture as an assist system framework for actual clinical usage. The experimental results show a noticeable improvement in IAP models on accuracies, f1-scores and recall rates compared to their non-IAP counterparts (i.e., basic predictors).