Iranian Journal of

  Background and Objectives : recent years, considerable attention has been paid to statistical models for classification of medical data according to various diseases and their outcomes. Artificial neural networks have been successfully used for pattern recognition and prediction since they are not based on prior assumptions in clinical studies. This study compared two statistical models, artificial neural network and logistic regression, to predict the survival of patients with breast cancer.

  Methods: Two models were applied on cancer registry data, Kerman, southeast of Iran, to predict survival. The data of 712 breast cancer patients in the age group 15 to 85 years was used in this study. The logistic regression and three-layer perceptron neural network models were compared in terms of predicting the survival. Sensitivity, specificity, prediction accuracy, and the area under ROC curve were used for comparing the two models.

  Results : In this study, the sensitivity and specificity of logistic regression and artificial neural network models were (0.594, 0.70) and (0.621, 0.723), respectively. Prediction accuracy and the area under ROC curve for two models were (0.688, 0.725) and (0.70, 0.725), respectively.

  Conclusion: Although there were insignificant differences in the performance of the two models for predicting the survival of the patients with breast cancer, the corresponding results of artificial neural network were more appropriate for predicting survival in such data.