DHHoE: Deep hybrid homogenous ensemble for digital histological breast cancer classification

The progress of deep learning architectures, machine learning models and pathology slide digitization is an encouraging step toward meeting the growing demand for more precise classification and prediction diagnosis for the breast tumours. The BreakHis dataset with four magnification factors (40X, 100X, 200X and 400X), as well as seven deep learning architectures used for feature extraction (DenseNet 201, Inception ResNet V2, Inception V3, ResNet 50, MobileNet V2,VGG16 and VGG19), four machine learning models for classification (MLP, SVM, DT, and KNN), and two combination rules (hard and weighted voting) were investigated in this paper to design and evaluate a new proposed approach consisting of building deep hybrid homogenous ensemble. Additionally, the best proposed models were compared to deep stacked, deep bagging, deep boosting, and deep hybrid heterogenous ensemble to choose the best strategy in building deep ensemble learning techniques. The four performance measures accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score were used in the empirical evaluations, as well as 5-fold cross-validation, the Scott Knott statistical test, and the Borda Count voting method. The results demonstrated the new approach's potential since it outscored both singles and other deep ensemble learning strategies, achieving accuracy values of 98.3% and 97.7% for the MFs 40X, 100X and 200X, 400X, respectively. The empirical results demonstrated that the proposed ensembles are impactful for histopathological breast cancer images classification, and they provided a promising tool to assist pathologists in the diagnosis of breast cancer.