Machine Learning Advances Fight Against Cancer

Developing effective tools against cancer has been a long, complicated endeavor with successes and disappointments. Despite all, cancer remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Now, machine learning and data analytics are being recruited as tools in the effort fight the disease and show significant promise according to two recent papers. In one paper – An Analytics Approach to Designing Combination Chemotherapy Regimens for Cancer – researchers from MIT and Stanford "propose models that use machine learning and optimization to suggest regimens to be tested in phase II and phase III trials." Their work, published in March in Management Science, could help cut costs and speed clinical trials.