Personalized breast cancer onset prediction from lifestyle and health history information

We propose a method to predict when a woman will develop breast cancer (BCa) from her lifestyle and health history features. To address this objective, we use data from the Alberta’s Tomorrow Project of 18,288 women to train Individual Survival Distribution (ISD) models to predict an individual’s Breast-Cancer-Onset (BCaO) probability curve. We show that our three-step approach–(1) filling missing data with multiple imputations by chained equations, followed by (2) feature selection with the multivariate Cox method, and finally, (3) using MTLR to learn an ISD model–produced the model with the smallest L1-Hinge loss among all calibrated models with comparable C-index. We also identified 7 actionable lifestyle features that a woman can modify and illustrate how this model can predict the quantitative effects of those changes–suggesting how much each will potentially extend her BCa-free time. We anticipate this approach could be used to identify appropriate interventions for individuals with a higher likelihood of developing BCa in their lifetime.