Breast cancer survival prediction can have
an extreme effect on selection of best treatment protocols. Many approaches such as statistical or machine learning models have been employed to predict
the survival prospects of patients, but newer algorithms such as deep learning can be tested with the
aim of improving the models and prediction accuracy. In this study, we used machine learning and deep
learning approaches to predict breast cancer survival in 4,902 patient records from the University of
Malaya Medical Centre Breast Cancer Registry. The
results indicated that the multilayer perceptron (MLP),
random forest (RF) and decision tree (DT) classifiers
could predict survivorship, respectively, with 88.2 %,
83.3 % and 82.5 % accuracy in the tested samples.
Support vector machine (SVM) came out to be lower
with 80.5 %. In this study, tumour size turned out to
be the most important feature for breast cancer survivability prediction. Both deep learning and machine learning methods produce desirable prediction
accuracy, but other factors such as parameter configurations and data transformations affect the accuracy of the predictive model.