Development of a Decision Tree Classifier for Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Fine Needle Aspirate Data

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality among women globally, necessitating early and accurate detection to improve survival rates. This study leverages machine learning to develop a decision tree classifier for distinguishing between benign and malignant breast masses using the Kaggle Breast Cancer FNA dataset. The dataset underwent rigorous pre-processing, including the removal of irrelevant columns, data cleaning, label encoding, and feature scaling. The model was evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation, achieving an average accuracy of 84.0%, with a test set accuracy of 83.72%. Performance metrics such as precision, recall, and F1-score further validated the model's robustness, with an overall accuracy of 90.24% on the test set. The decision tree classifier demonstrated high interpretability, making it a practical tool for aiding clinical decision-making. While the results are promising, the study highlights opportunities for improvement, including the use of ensemble methods and larger datasets to enhance generalizability. This research contributes to the growing body of evidence supporting machine learning applications in medical diagnostics, particularly in breast cancer detection.