Abstract
Predicting the survival status of patients who will undergo breast cancer surgery is highly important, where it indicates whether conducting a surgery is the best solution for the presented medical case or not. Since this is a case of life or death, the need to explore better prediction techniques to ensure accurate survival status prediction cannot be overemphasized. In this paper we evaluate the performance of support vector machine (SVM) and Bayesian network (BN) in predicting the survival state of breast cancer patients after having a surgery. The experiments on both techniques have been carried out using Weka software package. Empirical results from simulations showed that support vector machine outperformed Bayesian network in this task, where support vector machine achieved better accuracy of 74.44% while Bayesian network had its best accuracy of 67.56%.