A probabilistic data analytics methodology based on Bayesian Belief network for predicting and understanding breast cancer survival

Understanding breast cancer survival has proven to be a challenging problem for practitioners and researchers. Identifying the factors affecting cancer progression, their interrelationships, and their influence on patients’ long-term survival helps make timely treatment decisions. The current study addresses this problem by proposing a Tree-Augmented Bayesian Belief Network (TAN)-based data analytics methodology comprising of four steps: data acquisition and preprocessing, variable selection via Genetic Algorithm (GA), data balancing with synthetic minority over-sampling and random under-sampling methods, and finally the development of the TAN model to determine the probabilistic inter-conditional dependency structure among breast cancer-related variables along with the posterior survival probabilities The proposed model is compared to well-known machine learning models. A what-if analysis has also been conducted to verify the associations among the variables in the TAN model. The relative importance of each variable has been investigated via sensitivity analysis. Finally, a decision support tool is developed to further explore the conditional dependency structure among the cancer-related factors. The results produced by the proposed methodology, namely the patient-specific posterior survival probabilities and the conditional relationships among the variables, can be used by healthcare professionals and physicians to improve the decision-making process in planning and managing breast cancer treatments. Our generic methodology can also accommodate other types of cancer and be applied to manage various medical procedures.