Lymph diseases diagnosis approach based on support vector machines with different kernel functions

In this paper, a Genetic algorithm (GA) based supporting vector machine classifier (GA-SVM) is proposed for lymph diseases diagnosis. In the first stage, dimension of lymph diseases dataset that has 18 features is reduced to six features using GA. In the second stage, a support vector machine with different kernel functions including linear, Quadratic and Gaussian was utilized as a classifier. The Lymphography database was obtained from the University Medical Center, Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. The obtained classification accuracy was very promising with regard to the other classification applications in the literature for this problem. The performance of SVM classifier with each kernel function was evaluated by using performance indices such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, area under curve (AUC) or (ROC), Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) and F-Measure. Linear kernel function obtained highest results which verifies the efficiency of GA-linear stategy.