An alternating least square based algorithm for predicting patient survivability

Authors

Qiming Hu, University of WollongongFollow
Jie Yang, University of WollongongFollow
Khin Than Win, University of WollongongFollow
Xu-Feng Huang, University of WollongongFollow

RIS ID

134671

Publication Details

Hu, Q., Yang, J., Win, K. Than. & Huang, X. (2019). An alternating least square based algorithm for predicting patient survivability. Communications in Computer and Information Science, 996 305-317. Data Mining: 16th Australasian Conference, AusDM 2018 Bathurst, NSW, Australia, November 28-30, 2018 Revised Selected Papers

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common cancer to females worldwide. Using machine learning technology to predict breast-cancer patients' survivability has drawn a lot of research interest. However, it still faces many issues, such as missing-value imputation. As such, the main objective of this paper is to develop a novel imputation algorithm, inspired by the recommendation system. More precisely, features with missing values are regarded as items to be evaluated for recommendation.

Consequently, a matrix factorisation algorithm (Alternating Least Square, ALS) is employed to replace missing values; accordingly, four different prediction strategies based on the ALS result are further discussed. The proposed ALS-based imputation algorithm is evaluated by using a large patient dataset from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. Experimental results demonstrates a significant improvement on the survivability prediction, compared to existing methods.