COVID-19 Severity Prediction in SARS-CoV-2 RNA-Positive Patients by
Different Ensemble Learning Strategies
Abstract
Objective: While the coronavirus persists marginally for ninety-five
percent of the infected case count, the remaining five percent have been
placed in a critical or vital condition. This study investigates to
design an intelligent model that predicts the disease severity level by
modeling the relationships between the severity of COVID-19 infection
and the various demographic/clinical characteristics of individuals.
Material and Methods: A public dataset of a cross-sectional study
included the demographic and symptomatological characteristics of 223
COVID-19 patients. The dataset was randomly divided into training (75%)
and testing (25%) datasets. During training, the class imbalance
problem was solved, and the related factors with the COVID-19 severity
were selected using the evolutionary method supported by a genetic
algorithm. Neural Network (NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), QUEST
algorithms together with confidence weighted voting, voting, and highest
confidence wins strategies (HCWS) were constructed, and the predictive
power of models was evaluated by performance metrics. Results: Of the
individual models, the NN model outperformed SVM and QUEST algorithms
based on the performance metrics in the training and testing datasets.
However, ensemble approaches gave better predictions as compared to the
individual models regarding all the evaluation metrics. Conclusions: The
proposed voting ensemble model outperforms other ensemble and individual
machine learning approaches for the severity prediction of COVID-19
disease. The proposed ensemble learning model can be integrated into web
or mobile applications in classifying the severity of COVID-19 for
clinical decision support.