Features are computed from a digitized image of a fine needle aspirate (FNA) of a breast mass. They describe characteristics of the cell nuclei present in the image. Separating plane described above was obtained using Multisurface Method-Tree (MSM-T) [K. P. Bennett, "Decision Tree Construction Via Linear Programming." Proceedings of the 4th Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Society, pp. 97-101, 1992], a classification method which uses linear programming to construct a decision tree. Relevant features were selected using an exhaustive search in the space of 1-4 features and 1-3 separating planes. The actual linear program used to obtain the separating plane in the 3-dimensional space is that described in: [K. P. Bennett and O. L. Mangasarian: "Robust Linear Programming Discrimination of Two Linearly Inseparable Sets", Optimization Methods and Software 1, 1992, 23-34].
Number of instances: 569
Number of attributes: 32 (ID, diagnosis, 30 real-valued input features)
Diagnosis (M = malignant, B = benign)
Ten real-valued features are computed for each cell nucleus:
a) radius (mean of distances from center to points on the perimeter)
b) texture (standard deviation of gray-scale values)
c) perimeter
d) area
e) smoothness (local variation in radius lengths)
f) compactness (perimeter^2 / area - 1.0)
g) concavity (severity of concave portions of the contour)
h) concave points (number of concave portions of the contour)
i) symmetry
j) fractal dimension ("coastline approximation" - 1)
Missing attribute values: none
Class distribution: 357 benign, 212 malignant
Dr. William H. Wolberg, General Surgery Dept., University of Wisconsin.
W. Nick Street, Computer Sciences Dept., University of Wisconsin.
Olvi L. Mangasarian, Computer Sciences Dept., University of Wisconsin.