A mixture of experts network structure for breast cancer diagnosis

Abstract

Mixture of experts (ME) is a modular neural network architecture for supervised learning. This paper illustrates the use of ME network structure to guide diagnosing of breast cancer. Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm was used for training the ME so that the learning process is decoupled in a manner that fits well with the modular structure. Diagnosis tasks are among the most interesting activities in which to implement intelligent systems. Specifically, diagnosis is an attempt to accurately forecast the outcome of a specific situation, using as input information obtained from a concrete set of variables that potentially describe the situation. The ME network structure was implemented for breast cancer diagnosis using the attributes of each record in the Wisconsin breast cancer database. To improve diagnostic accuracy, the outputs of expert networks were combined by a gating network simultaneously trained in order to stochastically select the expert that is performing the best at solving the problem. For the Wisconsin breast cancer diagnosis problem, the obtained total classification accuracy by the ME network structure was 98.85%. The ME network structure achieved accuracy rates which were higher than that of the stand-alone neural network models. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.