Comparing different machine learning techniques for predicting COVID-19 severity

Infectious Diseases of Poverty

Lianguo Ruan¹  Dan Li²  Yan Ma³  Cheng Lu³  Yibai Xiong³  Luqi Huang⁴ 

[1] Department of Infectious Diseases, JinYinTan Hospital, 430040, Wuhan, China;Information Center, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 102206, Beijing, China;Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, No. 16, Nanxiao Street, Dongzhimen, Dongcheng District, 100700, Beijing, Beijing, China;National Resource Center for Chinese Materia Medica, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, No. 16, Nanxiao Street, Dongzhimen, Dongcheng District, 100700, Beijing, Beijing, China;

关键词: COVID-19;    Severity;    Machine learning;    Support vector machine;    Random Forest;    Logistic regression;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s40249-022-00946-4

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is still ongoing spreading globally, machine learning techniques were used in disease diagnosis and to predict treatment outcomes, which showed favorable performance. The present study aims to predict COVID-19 severity at admission by different machine learning techniques including random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and logistic regression (LR). Feature importance to COVID-19 severity were further identified.MethodsA retrospective design was adopted in the JinYinTan Hospital from January 26 to March 28, 2020, eighty-six demographic, clinical, and laboratory features were selected with LassoCV method, Spearman’s rank correlation, experts’ opinions, and literature evaluation. RF, SVM, and LR were performed to predict severe COVID-19, the performance of the models was compared by the area under curve (AUC). Additionally, feature importance to COVID-19 severity were analyzed by the best performance model.ResultsA total of 287 patients were enrolled with 36.6% severe cases and 63.4% non-severe cases. The median age was 60.0 years (interquartile range: 49.0–68.0 years). Three models were established using 23 features including 1 clinical, 1 chest computed tomography (CT) and 21 laboratory features. Among three models, RF yielded better overall performance with the highest AUC of 0.970 than SVM of 0.948 and LR of 0.928, RF also achieved a favorable sensitivity of 96.7%, specificity of 69.5%, and accuracy of 84.5%. SVM had sensitivity of 93.9%, specificity of 79.0%, and accuracy of 88.5%. LR also achieved a favorable sensitivity of 92.3%, specificity of 72.3%, and accuracy of 85.2%. Additionally, chest-CT had highest importance to illness severity, and the following features were neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio, lactate dehydrogenase, and D-dimer, respectively.ConclusionsOur results indicated that RF could be a useful predictive tool to identify patients with severe COVID-19, which may facilitate effective care and further optimize resources.Graphical Abstract

【 授权许可】

CC BY