Deep Learning Causal Attributions of Breast Cancer

In this paper, a deep learning-based approach is applied to high dimensional, high-volume, and high-sparsity medical data to identify critical casual attributions that might affect the survival of a breast cancer patient. The Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) breast cancer data is explored in this study. The SEER data set contains accumulated patient-level and treatment-level information, such as cancer site, cancer stage, treatment received, and cause of death. Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are proposed for dimensionality reduction in the analysis. RBM is a popular paradigm of deep learning networks and can be used to extract features from a given data set and transform data in a non-linear manner into a lower dimensional space for further modelling. In this study, a group of RBMs has been trained to sequentially transform the original data into a very low dimensional space, and then the k-means clustering is conducted in this space. Furthermore, the results obtained about the cluster membership of the data samples are mapped back to the original sample space for interpretation and insight creation. The analysis has demonstrated that essential features relating to breast cancer survival can be effectively extracted and brought forward into a much lower dimensional space formed by RBMs.