Evolving Hierarchical RBF Neural Networks for Breast Cancer Detection

Hierarchical RBF networks consist of multiple RBF networks assembled in different level or cascade architecture. In this paper, an evolved hierarchical RBF network was employed to detect the breast cancel. For evolving a hierarchical RBF network model, Extended Compact Genetic Programming (ECGP), a tree-structure based evolutionary algorithm and the Differential Evolution (DE) are used to find an optimal detection model. The performance of proposed method was then compared with Flexible Neural Tree (FNT), Neural Network (NN), and RBF Neural Network (RBF-NN) by using the same breast cancer data set. Simulation results show that the obtained hierarchical RBF network model has a fewer number of variables with reduced number of input features and with the high detection accuracy.