Applying Different Machine Learning Techniques for Prediction of COVID-19 Severity

Exponential Pixelating Integral transform with dual fractal features for enhanced chest X-ray abnormality detection

The heightened prevalence of respiratory disorders, particularly exacerbated by a significant upswing in fatalities due to the novel coronavirus, underscores the critical need for early detection and timely intervention. This imperative is paramount, possessing the potential to profoundly impact and safeguard numerous lives. Medically, chest radiography stands out as an essential and economically viable medical imaging approach for diagnosing and assessing the severity of diverse Respiratory Disorders. However, their detection in Chest X-Rays is a cumbersome task even for well-trained radiologists owing to low contrast issues, overlapping of the tissue structures, subjective variability, and the presence of noise. To address these issues, a novel analytical model termed Exponential Pixelating Integral is introduced for the automatic detection of infections in Chest X-Rays in this work. Initially, the presented Exponential Pixelating Integral enhances the pixel intensities to overcome the low-contrast issues that are then polar-transformed followed by their representation using the locally invariant Mandelbrot and Julia fractal geometries for effective distinction of structural features. The collated features labeled Exponential Pixelating Integral with dually characterized fractal features are then classified by the non-parametric multivariate adaptive regression splines to establish an ensemble model between each pair of classes for effective diagnosis of diverse diseases. Rigorous analysis of the proposed classification framework on large medical benchmarked datasets showcases its superiority over its peers by registering a higher classification accuracy and F1 scores ranging from 98.46 to 99.45 % and 96.53-98.10 % respectively, making it a precise and interpretable automated system for diagnosing respiratory disorders.

A novel hybrid supervised and unsupervised hierarchical ensemble for COVID-19 cases and mortality prediction

Though COVID-19 is no longer a pandemic but rather an endemic, the epidemiological situation related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus is developing at an alarming rate, impacting every corner of the world. The rapid escalation of the coronavirus has led to the scientific community engagement, continually seeking solutions to ensure the comfort and safety of society. Understanding the joint impact of medical and non-medical interventions on COVID-19 spread is essential for making public health decisions that control the pandemic. This paper introduces two novel hybrid machine-learning ensembles that combine supervised and unsupervised learning for COVID-19 data classification and regression. The study utilizes publicly available COVID-19 outbreak and potential predictive features in the USA dataset, which provides information related to the outbreak of COVID-19 disease in the US, including data from each of 3142 US counties from the beginning of the epidemic (January 2020) until June 2021. The developed hybrid hierarchical classifiers outperform single classification algorithms. The best-achieved performance metrics for the classification task were Accuracy = 0.912, ROC-AUC = 0.916, and F1-score = 0.916. The proposed hybrid hierarchical ensemble combining both supervised and unsupervised learning allows us to increase the accuracy of the regression task by 11% in terms of MSE, 29% in terms of the area under the ROC, and 43% in terms of the MPP metric. Thus, using the proposed approach, it is possible to predict the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths based on demographic, geographic, climatic, traffic, public health, social-distancing-policy adherence, and political characteristics with sufficiently high accuracy. The study reveals that virus pressure is the most important feature in COVID-19 spread for classification and regression analysis. Five other significant features were identified to have the most influence on COVID-19 spread. The combined ensembling approach introduced in this study can help policymakers design prevention and control measures to avoid or minimize public health threats in the future.

Deep learning in public health: Comparative predictive models for COVID-19 case forecasting

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on both the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Malaysia, emphasizing the importance of developing accurate and reliable forecasting mechanisms to guide public health responses and policies. In this study, we compared several cutting-edge deep learning models, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), hybrid CNN-LSTM, Multilayer Perceptron's, and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), to project COVID-19 cases in the aforementioned regions. These models were calibrated and evaluated using a comprehensive dataset that includes confirmed case counts, demographic data, and relevant socioeconomic factors. To enhance the performance of these models, Bayesian optimization techniques were employed. Subsequently, the models were re-evaluated to compare their effectiveness. Analytic approaches, both predictive and retrospective in nature, were used to interpret the data. Our primary objective was to determine the most effective model for predicting COVID-19 cases in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Malaysia. The findings indicate that the selected deep learning algorithms were proficient in forecasting COVID-19 cases, although their efficacy varied across different models. After a thorough evaluation, the model architectures most suitable for the specific conditions in the UAE and Malaysia were identified. Our study contributes significantly to the ongoing efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, providing crucial insights into the application of sophisticated deep learning algorithms for the precise and timely forecasting of COVID-19 cases. These insights hold substantial value for shaping public health strategies, enabling authorities to develop targeted and evidence-based interventions to manage the virus spread and its impact on the populations of the UAE and Malaysia. The study confirms the usefulness of deep learning methodologies in efficiently processing complex datasets and generating reliable projections, a skill of great importance in healthcare and professional settings.

Significance of weather condition, human mobility, and vaccination on global COVID-19 transmission

The transmission growth rate of infectious diseases, particularly COVID-19, has forced governments to take immediate control decisions. Previous studies have shown that human mobility, weather condition, and vaccination are potential factors influencing virus transmission. This study investigates the contribution of weather conditions, namely temperature and precipitation, human mobility, and vaccination to coronavirus transmission. Three machine learning models: random forest (RF), XGBoost, and neural networks, are applied to predict the confirmed cases based on three aforementioned variables. All models' prediction are evaluated via spatial and temporal analysis. The spatial analysis observes the model performance over countries on certain times. The temporal analysis looks at the model prediction of each country during the specified period. The models' prediction results effectively indicate the transmission trend. The RF model performs best with a coefficient of determination of up to 89%. Meanwhile, all models confirm that vaccination is most significantly associated with COVID-19 cases.

Augmentation strategies for an imbalanced learning problem on a novel COVID-19 severity dataset

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many different machine learning models have been developed to detect and verify COVID-19 pneumonia based on chest X-ray images. Although promising, binary models have only limited implications for medical treatment, whereas the prediction of disease severity suggests more suitable and specific treatment options. In this study, we publish severity scores for the 2358 COVID-19 positive images in the COVIDx8B dataset, creating one of the largest collections of publicly available COVID-19 severity data. Furthermore, we train and evaluate deep learning models on the newly created dataset to provide a first benchmark for the severity classification task. One of the main challenges of this dataset is the skewed class distribution, resulting in undesirable model performance for the most severe cases. We therefore propose and examine different augmentation strategies, specifically targeting majority and minority classes. Our augmentation strategies show significant improvements in precision and recall values for the rare and most severe cases. While the models might not yet fulfill medical requirements, they serve as an appropriate starting point for further research with the proposed dataset to optimize clinical resource allocation and treatment.

IoT-Enabled Framework for Early Detection and Prediction of COVID-19 Suspects by Leveraging Machine Learning in Cloud

COVID-19 is the repugnant but the most searched word since its outbreak in November 2019 across the globe. The world has to battle with it until an effective solution is developed. Due to the advancement in mobile and sensor technology, it is possible to come up with Internet of things-based healthcare systems. These novel healthcare systems can be proactive and preventive rather than traditional reactive healthcare systems. This article proposes a real-time IoT-enabled framework for the detection and prediction of COVID-19 suspects in early stages, by collecting symptomatic data and analyzing the nature of the virus in a better manner. The framework computes the presence of COVID-19 virus by mining the health parameters collected in real time from sensors and other IoT devices. The framework is comprised of four main components: user system or data collection center, data analytic center, diagnostic system, and cloud system. To point out and detect the COVID-19 suspected in real time, this work proposes the five machine learning techniques, namely support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, naïve Bayes, logistic regression, and neural network. In our proposed framework, the real and primary dataset collected from SKIMS, Srinagar, is used to validate our work. The experiment on the primary dataset was conducted using different machine learning techniques on selected symptoms. The efficiency of algorithms is calculated by computing the results of performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, root-mean-square error, and area under the curve score. The employed machine learning techniques have shown the accuracy of above 95% on the primary symptomatic data. Based on the experiment conducted, the proposed framework would be effective in the early identification and prediction of COVID-19 suspect realizing the nature of the disease in better way.