Multi-objective techniques for feature selection and classification in digital mammography

Feature selection is a crucial stage in the design of a computer-aided classification system for breast cancer diagnosis. The main objective of the proposed research design is to discover the use of multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) and Nondominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (NSGA-III) for feature selection in digital mammography. The Pareto-optimal fronts generated by MOPSO and NSGA-III for two conflicting objective functions are used to select optimal features. An artificial neural network (ANN) is used to compute the fitness of objective functions. The importance of features selected by MOPSO and NSGA-III are assessed using artificial neural networks. The experimental results show that MOPSO based optimization is superior to NSGA-III. MOPSO achieves high accuracy with a 55% feature reduction. MOPSO based feature selection and classification deliver an efficiency of 97.54% with 98.22% sensitivity, 96.82% specificity, 0.9508 Cohen's kappa coefficient, and area under curve A(Z) = 0.983 +/- 0.003.