  In this paper, we describe a dataset relating to cellular and physical
conditions of patients who are operated upon to remove colorectal tumours. This
data provides a unique insight into immunological status at the point of tumour
removal, tumour classification and post-operative survival. Attempts are made
to learn relationships between attributes (physical and immunological) and the
resulting tumour stage and survival. Results for conventional machine learning
approaches can be considered poor, especially for predicting tumour stages for
the most important types of cancer. This poor performance is further
investigated and compared with a synthetic, dataset based on the logical
exclusive-OR function and it is shown that there is a significant level of
'anti-learning' present in all supervised methods used and this can be
explained by the highly dimensional, complex and sparsely representative
dataset. For predicting the stage of cancer from the immunological attributes,
anti-learning approaches outperform a range of popular algorithms.
