A survival prediction model based on PCA-HSIDA-LSSVM for patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is a type of cancer and has some of the highest rates of both incidence and mortality globally. Developing accurate models for survival prediction provides a basis clinical judgment and decision making, improving the survival status of ESCC patients. Although many predictive models have been developed, there is still lack of highly accurate survival prediction models for ESCC patients. This study proposes a novel survival prediction model for ESCC patients based on principal component analysis (PCA) and least-squares support vector machine (LSSVM) optimized by an improved dragonfly algorithm with hybrid strategy (HSIDA). The original 17 blood indicators are condensed into five new variables by PCA, reducing data dimensionality and redundancy. An improved dragonfly algorithm based on hybrid strategy is proposed, which addresses the limitations of dragonfly algorithm, such as slow convergence, low search accuracy and insufficient vitality of late search. The proposed HSIDA is used to optimize the regularization parameter and kernel parameter of LSSVM, improving the prediction accuracy of the model. The proposed model is validated on the dataset of 400 patients with ESCC in the clinical database of First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University and the State Key Laboratory of Esophageal Cancer Prevention and Control of Henan Province. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed HSIDA-LSSVM has the best prediction performance than LSSVM, HSIDA-BP, IPSO-LSSVM, COA-LSSVM and IBA-LSSVM. The proposed model achieves the accuracy of 96.25%, sensitivity of 95.12%, specificity of 97.44%, precision of 97.50%, and F1 score of 96.30%.