Design and implementation of a survival model for patients with melanoma based on data mining algorithms

Among the most commonly diagnosed cancers, melanoma is the second leading cause of cancer-related death. A growing number of people are becoming victims of melanoma. Melanoma is also the most malignant and rare form of skin cancer. Advanced cases of the disease may cause death due to the spread of the disease to internal organs. The National Cancer Institute reported that approximately 99,780 people were diagnosed with melanoma in 2022, and approximately 7,650 died. Therefore, this study aims to develop an optimization algorithm for predicting melanoma patients' survival.

This applied research was a descriptive-analytical and retrospective study. The study population included patients with melanoma cancer identified from the National Cancer Research Center at Shahid Beheshti University between 2008 and 2013, with a follow-up period of five years. An optimization model was selected for melanoma survival prognosis based on the evaluation metrics of data mining algorithms.

A neural network algorithm, a Naïve Bayes network, a Bayesian network, a combination of decision tree and Naïve Bayes network, logistic regression, J48, and ID3 were selected as the models used in the national database. Statistically, the studied neural network outperformed other selected algorithms in all evaluation metrics.

The results of the present study showed that the neural network with a value of 0.97 has optimal performance in terms of reliability. Therefore, the predictive model of melanoma survival showed a better performance both in terms of discrimination power and reliability. Therefore, this algorithm was proposed as a melanoma survival prediction model.