Pan-Cancer Classification of Gene Expression Data Based on Artificial Neural Network Model

Although precision classification is a vital issue for therapy, cancer diagnosis has been shown to have serious constraints. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning model based on gene expression data to perform a pan-cancer classification on 16 cancer types. We used principal component analysis (PCA) to decrease data dimensionality before building a neural network model for pan-cancer prediction. The performance of accuracy was monitored and optimized using the Adam algorithm. We compared the results of the model with a random forest classifier and XGBoost. The results show that the neural network model and random forest achieve high and similar classification performance (neural network mean accuracy: 0.84; random forest mean accuracy: 0.86; XGBoost mean accuracy: 0.90). Thus, we suggest future studies of neural network, random forest and XGBoost models for the detection of cancer in order to identify early treatment approaches to enhance cancer survival.