Application of a GRNN oracle to the intelligent combination of several breast cancer benign/malignant predictive paradigms
The General Regression Neural Network (GRNN) is well known to be an extremely effective prediction model in a wide variety of problems. It has been recently established that in many prediction problems, the results obtained by intelligently combining the outputs of several different prediction models are generally superior to the results obtained by using any one of the models. An overseer model that combines predictions from other independently trained prediction models is often called an oracle. This paper describes how the GRNN is modified to serve as a powerful oracle for combining decisions from four different breast cancer benign/malignant prediction models using mammogram data. Specifically, the GRNN oracle combines decisions from an evolutionary programming derived neural network, a probabilistic neural network, a fully-interconnected three-layer, feed-forward, error backpropagation network, and a linear discriminant analysis model. In all experiments conducted, the oracle consistently provided superior benign/malignant classification discrimination as measured by the receiver operator characteristic curve Az index values
