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Is This Breast Biopsy Malignant?

From nine cell characteristics scored by a pathologist, is this fine-needle biopsy malignant or benign? It's one of the oldest medical tables in machine learning and still a good first test.

Use caseHealthcarePredictionModel evaluation

The table

699 biopsies with nine cell features scored from 1 to 10, such as clump thickness and cell size, and a benign or malignant result. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Breast Cancer Wisconsin Cytology Features (Original), 699 rows by 10 columns, licensed CC BY 4.0. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.91. At 699 rows and 9 features, TabICLv2, Kumo Tabular Medium and Mitra-v2 take the table as it is. The others can't take a table this size, so the walkthrough leaves them out.

Walkthrough

  1. Load it from the catalogue

    Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.

    import pandas as pd
    from welt import Client
    
    with Client() as client:
        item = client.research_datasets(q="breast cancer Wisconsin original", limit=1)["items"][0]
        info = client.research_dataset(item["id"])
        data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"])
    
    target = info["targets"][0]
    target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target
    print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)
  2. Pick the rows

    Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end, and keep the rest for the models to learn from.

    known = data.dropna(subset=[target])
    new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1)
    table = known.drop(new_rows.index)
  3. Compare the models and predict

    The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. ROC AUC runs from 0.5, a coin toss, to 1, a perfect ranking, and a lower Brier score means the probabilities can be trusted more. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.

    with Client() as client:
        evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="classification", seed=7,
                                     models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium", "mitra-v2"])
        model = evaluation.fit()
    
    print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "roc_auc_mean", "brier_mean"]])
    features = new_rows.drop(columns=target)
    print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features),
                        "probability": model.predict_proba(features).max(axis=1)}))

What you get

A probability per biopsyBenign or malignant, with a probability.
A strong signalThe catalogue measures one of its highest signals here.
A classic benchmarkCompare with decades of published results.

Try it

Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "breast cancer Wisconsin original", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".