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• A new ensemble-based classification model for breast cancer detection is proposed. • Benchmark clinical data set is utilized to check the effectiveness of the model. • Most important risk factors of breast cancer were extracted using SVM. • Quite interpretable and accurate clinical decision support is yielded by the model. This paper presents a new data mining technique for an accurate prediction of breast cancer (BC), which is one of the major mortality causes among women around the globe. The main objective of our study is to expand an automatic expert system (ES) to provide an accurate diagnosis of BC. Both, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) were applied to analyze BC data. The well-known Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset (WBCD), available in the UCI repository, was examined in our study. We first tested the SVM algorithm using various values of the C , ɛ and γ parameters. As a result of the first experiment, we were able to observe that the adjustment of these regularization parameters can greatly improve the performance of the traditional SVM algorithm applied for BC detection. The highest obtained accuracy at the first step was 99.71%. Then, we performed a new BC detection approach based on two ensemble learning techniques: the confidence-weighted voting method and the boosting ensemble technique. Our model, called CWV-BANNSVM, combines boosting ANNs (BANN) and two SVMs, using optimal parameters selected during the first experiment. The performance of the applied methods was evaluated using several popular metrics, such as specificity, sensitivity, precision, FPR, FNR, F 1 score, AUC, Gini and accuracy. The proposed CWV-BANNSVM model was able to improve the performance of the traditional machine learning algorithms applied to BC detection, reaching the accuracy of 100%. To overcome the overfitting issue, we determined and used some appropriate parameter values of polynomial SVM. Our comparison with the existing studies dedicated to BC prediction suggests that the proposed CWV-BANN-SVM model provides one of the best prediction performances overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]