Maintaining proper health records improves machine learning predictions for novel 2019-nCoV

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Koffka Khan¹  Emilie Ramsahai² 

[1] Department of Computing and Information Technology, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago;UWI School of Business & Applied Studies Ltd (UWI-ROYTEC), 136-138 Henry Street, 24105, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago;

关键词: 2019-nCoV;    Pneumonia;    Machine learning;    AdaBoost;    Bagging;    Classifiers;    Disease;    Death;    Prediction;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12911-021-01537-3

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAn ongoing outbreak of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pneumonia continues to affect the whole world including major countries such as China, USA, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. We present outcome (‘recovered’, ‘isolated’ or ‘death’) risk estimates of 2019-nCoV over ‘early’ datasets. A major consideration is the likelihood of death for patients with 2019-nCoV.MethodAccounting for the impact of the variations in the reporting rate of 2019-nCoV, we used machine learning techniques (AdaBoost, bagging, extra-trees, decision trees and k-nearest neighbour classifiers) on two 2019-nCoV datasets obtained from Kaggle on March 30, 2020. We used ‘country’, ‘age’ and ‘gender’ as features to predict outcome for both datasets. We included the patient’s ‘disease’ history (only present in the second dataset) to predict the outcome for the second dataset.ResultsThe use of a patient’s ‘disease’ history improves the prediction of ‘death’ by more than sevenfold. The models ignoring a patent’s ‘disease’ history performed poorly in test predictions.ConclusionOur findings indicate the potential of using a patient’s ‘disease’ history as part of the feature set in machine learning techniques to improve 2019-nCoV predictions. This development can have a positive effect on predictive patient treatment and can result in easing currently overburdened healthcare systems worldwide, especially with the increasing prevalence of second and third wave re-infections in some countries.

【 授权许可】

CC BY