Detecting Thyroid Disease Using Optimized Machine Learning Model Based on Differential Evolution

Abstract Thyroid disease has been on the rise during the past few years. Owing to its importance in metabolism, early detection of thyroid disease is a task of critical importance. Despite several existing works on thyroid disease detection, the problem of class imbalance is not investigated very well. In addition, existing studies predominantly focus on the binary-class problem. This study aims to solve these issues by the proposed approach where ten types of thyroid diseases are considered. The proposed approach uses a differential evolution (DE)-based optimization algorithm to fine-tune the parameters of machine learning models. Moreover, conditional generative adversarial networks are used for data augmentation. Several sets of experiments are carried out to analyze the performance of the proposed approach with and without model optimization. Results suggest that a 0.998 accuracy score can be obtained using AdaBoost with DE optimization which is better than existing state-of-the-art models.