Accurate prediction of cancer can play a crucial role in its treatment. The procedure of cancer detection is incumbent upon the doctor, which at times can be subjected to human error and therefore leading to erroneous decisions. Using machine learning techniques for the same can prove to be beneficial. Many classification algorithms such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are proven to produce good classification accuracies. The following study models data sets for breast, liver, ovarian and prostate cancer using the aforementioned algorithms and compares them. The study covers data from condition of organs, which is called standard data and from gene expression data as well. This research has shown that SVM classifier can obtain better performance for classification in comparison to the ANN classifier.