Symptom based COVID-19 test recommendation system using machine learning technique

Abstract

At present, the mankind of the entire world is under serious threat due to the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic. The advent of this pandemic exposes many drawbacks in the medical and healthcare system. As per the guidelines of WHO, the spread of the virus must be controlled through proper measures that help cease the virus. Tracing infected subjects (people/patients) is exceedingly difficult across the globe. The testing process in many countries is hampered by the unavailability of COVID-19 Test kits. Therefore, a testing process needs a robust mechanism to identify the infected subject to reduce the infection rate. To address this issue, a Symptom-based COVID-19 Test Recommendation System using Machine Learning methods is proposed and tested on real data set. It is found that the results of the system are promising and accurate up to 99%. The proposed piece of work undergoes four steps. First, it creates synthesized data set by using inputs of the Superintendent of Physical Health Centre (Rajam). Second, the synthesized data set is balanced by using Random under-sampling (RUS) followed by Synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE). Third, different machine learning techniques such as K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), Naïve Bayes, Random Forest (RF), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and Support vector machine (SVM) are applied on both the Synthesized and balanced data sets to classify subjects into different classes based on age, comorbidity-chronic disease- and other symptoms (cold, cough, fever, and breathlessness). Finally, the COVID-19 Test Recommended System is created and integrated with the best classification model. From the experimental results, it is observed that the training and testing accuracy of all the classification models is more than 99% consequently, the COVID-19 Testing recommended system also gives 100% accuracy in predicting the category of a subject based on input symptoms.