Data mining a prostate cancer dataset using neural networks

Prostate cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer death worldwide, with a reported incidence rate of 650,000 cases per annum worldwide. The causal factors of prostate cancer still remain to he determined. In this paper, we investigate a medical dataset containing clinical information on 502 prostate cancer patients using the machine learning technique of rough sets and radial basis function neural network.. Our preliminary results yield a classification accuracy of 90%, with high sensitivity and specificity (both at approximately 91%). Our results yield a predictive positive value (PPN) of 81%) and a predictive negative value (PNV) of 95%.