On the Application of Advanced Machine Learning Methods to Analyze Enhanced, Multimodal Data from Persons Infected with COVID-19

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Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the rapid worldwide spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is having severe consequences for human health and the world economy. The virus affects different individuals differently, with many infected patients showing only mild symptoms, and others showing critical illness. To lessen the impact of the epidemic, one problem is to determine which factors play an important role in a patient’s progression of the disease. Here, we construct an enhanced COVID-19 structured dataset from more than one source, using natural language processing to add local weather conditions and country-specific research sentiment. The enhanced structured dataset contains 301,363 samples and 43 features, and we applied both machine learning algorithms and deep learning algorithms on it so as to forecast patient’s survival probability. In addition, we import alignment sequence data to improve the performance of the model. Application of Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) on the enhanced structured dataset achieves 97% accuracy in predicting patient’s survival; with climatic factors, and then age, showing the most importance. Similarly, the application of a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) achieves 98% accuracy. This work suggests that enhancing the available data, mostly basic information on patients, so as to include additional, potentially important features, such as weather conditions, is useful. The explored models suggest that textual weather descriptions can improve outcome forecast.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.08.193144: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Along these lines, we performed sentiment analysis on the abstracts of research papers (associated with COVID-19) using the Python package Textblob (https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob), which operates by analyzing text content and assigns emotional values to word based on matches to a built-in dictionary.
    Python
    suggested: (IPython, RRID:SCR_001658)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • No conflict of interest statement was detected. If there are no conflicts, we encourage authors to explicit state so.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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