Lab 8: Diagnosing Cancer

Discuss Slides

You can download these questions into a .qmd file by running the following line of code at the console in R.

usethis::use_course("https://tinyurl.com/lab-8-cancer")

In this lab you will train and evaluate a classification algorithm to determine whether or not a fine needle aspiration biopsy is cancerous (malignant) or non-cancerous (benign). The data were downloaded from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository and lightly processed.

# load data and set "B" (benign) as the reference level
library(tidyverse)
cells <- read_csv("https://www.dropbox.com/s/0rbzonyrzramdgl/cells.csv?dl=1") %>%
  mutate(diagnosis = factor(diagnosis, levels = c("B", "M")))

The diagnosis is in the column named diagnosis; each other column should be used to predict the diagnosis.

Understanding and Exploring the Data

1. What is the unit of observation in this data frame?

2. Use a box plot to compare the radius_mean for benign vs. malignant biopsies. What is the takeaway from this plot?

3. Select another variable that you suspect might be a good predictor of the diagnosis. Build a plot to illustrate their association and provide an interpretation of what the plot shows.

4. Make a plot that examines the association between two predictors, radius_mean and area_mean, and calculate the pearson correlation coefficient between these them. How would you describe the strength and shape of their association? What might cause this shape?

5. Make a single plot that examines the association between radius_mean and radius_sd separately for each diagnosis (hint: aes() should have three arguments). Calculate the correlation between these two variables for each diagnosis.

   Give an interpretation of these results. In particular comment on

   • Is the relationship between radius_mean and radius_sd different for benign biopsies vs. malignant biopsies?

   • If so, can you give an explanation for this difference?

Diagnosing Biopsies

6. Split the full cells data set into a roughly 80-20 train-test set split. How many observations do you have in each?

7. Using the training data, fit a simple logistic regression model that predicts the diagnosis using the mean of the texture index using a threshold of .5. What would your model predict for a biopsy with a mean texture of 15? What probability does it assign to that outcome?

8. Calculate the misclassification rate first on the training data and then on the testing data. Is there any evidence that this model is overfitting? How can you tell one way or the other?

9. Build a more complex model to predict the diagnosis using five predictors of your choosing, then calculate the testing and training misclassification rate. Is there evidence that your model is overfitting? How can you tell one way or the other?

10. If you were to deploy your method in a clinical setting to help diagnose cancer, which type of classification error would be worse and why?

11. Calculate the total number of false negatives in the test data set when using your simple model with only one variable.

12. What can you change about your classification rule to lower the number of false negatives? Make this change and calculate the new number of false negatives.

13. Calculate the testing misclassification rate using your new classification rule. Did it go up or down? Why?

14. In many realms of medicine, classification algorithms can be more accurate than the most well-trained medical doctors. What is gained and what is lost by shifting to algorithmic diagnoses? Although a book could be written about this topic, please answer in one paragraph.