Using Data Mining for Survival Prediction in Patients with Colon Cancer

Colon cancer is the third most common cancer in the world and the fourth most common cancer in Iran. It is very important to predict the cancer outcome and its basic clinical data. Due to to the high rate of colon cancer and the benefits of data mining to predict survival, the aim of this study was to survey two widely used machine learning algorithms, Bagging and Support Vector Machines (SVM), to predict the outcome of colon cancer patients.
The population of this study was 567 patients with stage 1-4 of colon cancer in Namazi Radiotherapy Center, Shiraz in 2006-2011. Three hundred and thirty eight patients were alive and 229 patients were dead. We used the Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Bagging methods in order to predict the survival of patients with colon cancer. The Weka software ver 3.6.10 was used for data analysis.
The performance of two algorithms was determined using the confusion matrix. The accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of the SVM was 84.48%, 81%, and 87%, and the accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of Bagging was 83.95%, 78%, and 88%, respectively.
The results showed both algorithms have a high performance in survival prediction of patients with colon cancer but the Support Vector Machines has a higher accuracy.