Differentiated Thyroid Cancer Recurrence Classification Using Machine Learning Models and Bayesian Neural Networks with Varying Priors: A SHAP-Based Interpretation of the Best Performing Model

Abstract

Differentiated thyroid cancer DTC recurrence is a major public health concern, requiring classification and predictive models that are not only accurate but also interpretable and uncertainty aware. This study introduces a comprehensive framework for DTC recurrence classification using a dataset containing 383 patients and 16 clinical and pathological variables. Initially, 11 machine learning ML models were employed using the complete dataset, where the Support Vector Machines SVM model achieved the highest accuracy of 0.9481. To reduce complexity and redundancy, feature selection was carried out using the Boruta algorithm, and the same ML models were applied to the reduced dataset, where it was observed that the Logistic Regression LR model obtained the maximum accuracy of 0.9611. However, these ML models often lack uncertainty quantification, which is critical in clinical decision making. Therefore, to address this limitation, the Bayesian Neural Networks BNN with six varying prior distributions, including Normal 0,1, Normal 0,10, Laplace 0,1, Cauchy 0,1, Cauchy 0,2.5, and Horseshoe 1, were implemented on both the complete and reduced datasets. The BNN model with Normal 0,10 prior distribution exhibited maximum accuracies of 0.9740 and 0.9870 before and after feature selection, respectively.