Explainable Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis Through Two-Level Machine Learning Optimization with an Improved Naked Mole-Rat...

Modern technologies, particularly artificial intelligence methods such as machine learning, hold immense potential for supporting doctors with cancer diagnostics. This study explores the enhancement of popular machine learning methods using a bio-inspired algorithm-the naked mole-rat algorithm (NMRA)-to assess the malignancy of thyroid tumors. The study utilized a novel dataset released in 2022, containing data collected at Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University. The dataset comprises 1232 records described by 19 features. In this research, 10 well-known classifiers, including XGBoost, LightGBM, and random forest, were employed to evaluate the malignancy of thyroid tumors. A key innovation of this study is the application of the naked mole-rat algorithm for parameter optimization and feature selection within the individual classifiers. Among the models tested, the LightGBM classifier demonstrated the highest performance, achieving a classification accuracy of 81.82% and an F1-score of 86.62%, following two-level parameter optimization and feature selection using the naked mole-rat algorithm. Additionally, explainability analysis of the LightGBM model was conducted using SHAP values, providing insights into the decision-making process of the model.