The fourth most frequent cause of cancer death in women is cervical cancer. No sign can be observed in the early stages of the disease. In addition, cervical cancer diagnosis methods used in health centers are time-consuming and costly. Data classification has been widely applied in the diagnosis of cervical cancer for knowledge acquisition. However, none of the existing intelligent methods are comprehensible, and they look like a black box to clinicians. In this paper, an ant colony optimization -based classification algorithm, Ant -Miner is applied to analyze the cervical cancer data set. The cervical cancer data set used was obtained from the repository of the University of California, Irvine. The proposed algorithm outperforms the previous approach, support vector machine, in the same domain, in terms of the better result of classification accuracy. The proposed method is implemented as an engine in a prototype system named as the cervical cancer detection system. Evaluation of the prototype system demonstrates a good result on its usability and functionality.