Breast cancer classification using deep belief networks

•We present a CAD scheme using DBN unsupervised path followed by NN supervised path.•Our two-phase method ‘DBN-NN’ classification accuracy is higher than using one phase.•Overall accuracy of DBN-NN reaches 99.68% with 100% sensitivity & 99.47% specificity.•DBN-NN was tested on the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset (WBCD).•DBN-NN results show classifier performance improvements over previous studies.