Cervical Cancer Prediction Based on Imbalanced Data Using Machine Learning Algorithms with a Variety of Sampling Methods

Cervical cancer affects a large portion of the female population, making the prediction of this disease using Machine Learning (ML) of utmost importance. ML algorithms can be integrated into complex, intelligent, agent-based systems that can offer decision support to resident medical doctors or even experienced medical doctors. For instance, an experienced medical doctor may diagnose a case but need expert support that related to another medical specialty. Data imbalance is frequent in healthcare data and has a negative influence on predictions made using ML algorithms. Cancer data, in general, and cervical cancer data, in particular, are frequently imbalanced. For this study, we chose a messy, real-life cervical cancer dataset available in the Kaggle repository that includes large amounts of missing and noisy values. To identify the best imbalanced technique for this medical dataset, the performances of eleven important resampling methods are compared, combined with the following state-of-the-art ML models that are frequently applied in predictive healtchare research: K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) (with k values of 2 and 3), binary Logistic Regression (bLR), and Random Forest (RF). The studied resampling methods include seven undersampling methods and four oversampling methods. For this dataset, the imbalance ratio was 12.73, with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 9.23% to 16.22%. The obtained results show that resampling methods help improve the classification ability of prediction models applied to cervical cancer data. The applied oversampling techniques for handling imbalanced data generally outperformed the undersampling methods. The average balanced accuracy for oversampling was 77.44%, compared to 62.28% for undersampling. When detecting the minority class, oversampling achieved an average score of 60.80%, while undersampling scored 41.36%. The logistic regression classifier had the greatest impact on balanced techniques, while random forest achieved promising performance, even before applying balancing techniques. Initially, KNN2 outperformed KNN3 across all metrics, including balanced accuracy, for which KNN2 achieved 53.57%, compared to 52.71% for KNN3. However, after applying oversampling techniques, KNN3 significantly improved its balanced accuracy to 73.78%, while that of KNN2 increased to 63.89%. Additionally, KNN3 outperformed KNN2 in minority class performance, scoring 55.72% compared to KNN2’s 33.93%.