Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for Early Prediction of Breast Cancer

Abstract

Breast cancer remains one of the leading causes of death among women worldwide, primarily due to late detection and diagnosis. Early and accurate prediction is essential to improve survival rates. Machine learning (ML) techniques have proven effective in supporting early diagnosis. This study aims to evaluate and compare the performance of three different approaches: traditional ML, ensemble ML, and deep learning (DL) for early prediction of breast cancer using the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset. The methodology includes data collection, preprocessing, and the design of predictive models. Traditional ML algorithms used include Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Na�ve Bayes (NB), and Decision Tree (DT). Ensemble ML techniques comprise Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, and AdaBoost, while DL models include Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The models were evaluated using precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy. The results indicate that XGBoost achieved the highest accuracy (0.99), with strong recall (0.98) and F1-score (0.986), outperforming all other ensemble and traditional ML methods. CNN achieved 0.99 in all evaluation metrics, slightly outperforming RNN, which attained 0.98 accuracy and 0.985 F1-score. These findings confirm that ensemble ML techniques outperform traditional models, while CNN leads among DL models. Furthermore, the proposed models demonstrated superior prediction performance compared to existing studies, particularly in minimizing false negatives, which is critical for healthcare applications.