ILSHIP: An interpretable and predictive model for hypothyroidism

Hypothyroidism is one of the common endocrine diseases, and its incidence is increasing year by year. Due to the insidious nature of this disease, it often leads to delayed treatment and even misdiagnosis. This paper proposes ILSHIP, an interpretable predictive model for hypothyroidism, to reduce its diagnostic complexity as well as improve the predictive performance and interpretability of existing models. First, the ILSHIP prediction model was built based on label encoding, missing value processing, feature selection, and data enhancement of the dataset. Second, the comprehensive performance of ILSHIP was compared with twelve existing related study models and eleven mainstream models, such as XGBoost and MLP. The experimental results showed that, based on the optimal hyperparameters the ILSHIP model can achieve 99.392%, 99.437%, 99.348%, 99.381%, and 99.960% in accuracy, recall, specificity, F1, and AUC, respectively. The accuracy of the ILSHIP model was about 0.7%-15.4% higher than the existing models. By introducing the SHAP framework into the ILSHIP model, important features affecting hypothyroidism such as thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) and free thyroxine index (FTI) were also identified, and the influencing factors for different individuals were finally analyzed to provide a basis for medical personnel to monitor the condition.