An Overview of Supervised Machine Learning Methods and Data Analysis for COVID-19 Detection

Abstract

Background and Objective. To mitigate the spread of the virus responsible for COVID-19, known as SARS-CoV-2, there is an urgent need for massive population testing. Due to the constant shortage of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test reagents, which are the tests for COVID-19 by excellence, several medical centers have opted for immunological tests to look for the presence of antibodies produced against this virus. However, these tests have a high rate of false positives (positive but actually negative test results) and false negatives (negative but actually positive test results) and are therefore not always reliable. In this paper, we proposed a solution based on Data Analysis and Machine Learning to detect COVID-19 infections. Methods. Our analysis and machine learning algorithm is based on most cited two clinical datasets from the literature: one from San Raffaele Hospital Milan Italia and the other from Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein São Paulo Brasilia. The datasets were processed to select the best features that most influence the target, and it turned out that almost all of them are blood parameters. EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) methods were applied to the datasets, and a comparative study of supervised machine learning models was done, after which the support vector machine (SVM) was selected as the one with the best performance. Results. SVM being the best performant is used as our proposed supervised machine learning algorithm. An accuracy of 99.29%, sensitivity of 92.79%, and specificity of 100% were obtained with the dataset from Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/einsteindata4u/covid19) after applying optimization to SVM. The same procedure and work were performed with the dataset taken from San Raffaele Hospital (https://zenodo.org/record/3886927#.YIluB5AzbMV). Once more, the SVM presented the best performance among other machine learning algorithms, and 92.86%, 93.55%, and 90.91% for accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, respectively, were obtained. Conclusion. The obtained results, when compared with others from the literature based on these same datasets, are superior, leading us to conclude that our proposed solution is reliable for the COVID-19 diagnosis.