Interpretability methods of machine learning algorithms with applications in breast cancer diagnosis

Early detection of breast cancer is a powerful tool towards decreasing its socioeconomic burden. Although, artificial intelligence (AI) methods have shown remarkable results towards this goal, their "black box" nature hinders their wide adoption in clinical practice. To address the need for AI guided breast cancer diagnosis, interpretability methods can be utilized. In this study, we used AI methods, i.e., Random Forests (RF), Neural Networks (NN) and Ensembles of Neural Networks (ENN), towards this goal and explained and optimized their performance through interpretability techniques, such as the Global Surrogate (GS) method, the Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) plots and the Shapley values (SV). The Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset of the open UCI repository was used for the training and evaluation of the AI algorithms. The best performance for breast cancer diagnosis was achieved by the proposed ENN (96.6% accuracy and 0.96 area under the ROC curve), and its predictions were explained by ICE plots, proving that its decisions were compliant with current medical knowledge and can be further utilized to gain new insights in the pathophysiological mechanisms of breast cancer. Feature selection based on features' importance according to the GS model improved the performance of the RF (leading the accuracy from 96.49% to 97.18% and the area under the ROC curve from 0.96 to 0.97) and feature selection based on features' importance according to SV improved the performance of the NN (leading the accuracy from 94.6% to 95.53% and the area under the ROC curve from 0.94 to 0.95). Compared to other approaches on the same dataset, our proposed models demonstrated state of the art performance while being interpretable.