Qual Quant DOI 10.1007/s11135-014-0090-z Heterogeneous classifiers fusion for dynamic breast cancer diagnosis using weighted vote based ensemble Saba Bashir · Usman Qamar · Farhan Hassan Khan Received: 25 April 2014 / Accepted: 5 August 2014 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract Ensemble classifiers provide an efficient method to deal with diverse set of appli- cations in various domains. The proposed research signifies the effectiveness of ensemble classifier for computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis. A novel combination of five heteroge- neous classifiers namely Naïve Bayes, Decision tree using Gini index, Decision tree using information gain, Support vector machine and Memory based learner are used to make an ensemble framework. Weighted voting technique is used to determine the final prediction where weights are assigned on the basis of classification accuracy. Four different breast cancer datasets are used from online data repositories. Feature selection and various pre- processing techniques are applied on the datasets to enhance the classification accuracy. The analyses of experimental results show that the proposed ensemble technique provided a significant improvement as compared to other classifiers. The best accuracy achieved by proposed ensemble is 97.42 % whereas the best precision and recall is 100 and 98.60 % respectively. Keywords Data mining · Classification · Breast cancer · Ensemble · Naïve Bayes · Decision Tree · Support vector machine · Memory based learner 1 Introduction Breast cancer is globally prevalent among females worldwide. Today, the survival rate has been increased due to technological advancements in cancer treatments. The survival rate S. Bashir · U. Qamar · F. H. Khan (B ) Computer Engineering Department, College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan e-mail: farhan.hassan@ceme.nust.edu.pk S. Bashir e-mail: saba.bashir@ceme.nust.edu.pk U. Qamar e-mail: usmanq@ceme.nust.edu.pk 123