Surrogate-assisted firefly algorithm for breast cancer detection

Breast cancer is a severe disease for women health, however, with expensive diagnostic cost or obsolete medical technique, many patients are hard to obtain prompt medical treatment. Thus, efficient detection result of breast cancer while lower medical cost may be a promising way to protect women health. Breast cancer detection using all features will take a lot of time and computational resources. Thus, in this paper, we proposed a novel framework with surrogate-assisted firefly algorithm (FA) for breast cancer detection (SFA-BCD). As an advanced evolutionary algorithm (EA), FA is adopted to make feature selection, and the machine learning as classifier identify the breast cancer. Moreover, the surrogate model is utilized to decrease computation cost and expensive computation, which is the approximation function built by offline data to the real object function. The comprehensive experiments have been conducted under several breast cancer dataset derived from UCI. Experimental results verified that the proposed framework with surrogate-assisted FA significantly reduced the computation cost.