Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy, with a steadily increasing incidence rate. Although the overall survival rate is relatively high, the risk of recurrence after definitive treatment such as Radioactive Iodine (RAI) therapy remains a significant clinical challenge. Predicting recurrence risk is crucial for optimizing monitoring strategies and interventions. With advances in technology, machine learning (ML) approaches are increasingly utilized to support medical predictions, including the recurrence of thyroid cancer. This study aims to evaluate the performance of four classification algorithms—Logistic Regression, XGBClassifier, Random Forest Classifier, and Voting Classifier—in predicting thyroid cancer recurrence using the Thyroid Cancer Recurrence After RAI Therapy dataset, which consists of 383 patient records and 13 key clinical attributes. The evaluation was conducted using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the curve (AUC) metrics. The results show that the XGBClassifier is the best-performing model with an accuracy of 97.4% and an AUC of 0.95, demonstrating superior performance in handling the minority class. This research is expected to contribute to the development of more effective machine learning–based clinical decision support systems for predicting thyroid cancer recurrence after therapy.
