breast cancer, R, random forest

From:
https://shiring.github.io/machine_learning/2017/01/15/rfe_ga_post

The data I am going to use to explore feature selection methods is the Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) Dataset:

W.N. Street, W.H. Wolberg and O.L. Mangasarian. Nuclear feature extraction for breast tumor diagnosis. IS&T/SPIE 1993 International Symposium on Electronic Imaging: Science and Technology, volume 1905, pages 861-870, San Jose, CA, 1993.

O.L. Mangasarian, W.N. Street and W.H. Wolberg. Breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis via linear programming. Operations Research, 43(4), pages 570-577, July-August 1995.

W.H. Wolberg, W.N. Street, and O.L. Mangasarian. Machine learning techniques to diagnose breast cancer from fine-needle aspirates. Cancer Letters 77 (1994) 163-171.

W.H. Wolberg, W.N. Street, and O.L. Mangasarian. Image analysis and machine learning applied to breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Analytical and Quantitative Cytology and Histology, Vol. 17 No. 2, pages 77-87, April 1995.

W.H. Wolberg, W.N. Street, D.M. Heisey, and O.L. Mangasarian. Computerized breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis from fine needle aspirates. Archives of Surgery 1995;130:511-516.

W.H. Wolberg, W.N. Street, D.M. Heisey, and O.L. Mangasarian. Computer-derived nuclear features distinguish malignant from benign breast cytology. Human Pathology, 26:792–796, 1995.

The data was downloaded from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository. The features in these datasets characterise cell nucleus properties and were generated from image analysis of fine needle aspirates (FNA) of breast masses.

Included are three datasets. The first dataset is small with only 9 features, the other two datasets have 30 and 33 features and vary in how strongly the two predictor classes cluster in PCA. I want to explore the effect of different feature selection methods on datasets with these different properties.