The Prediction of COVID 19 Disease Using Feature Selection Techniques

Abstract

COVID 19 has spread rapidly around the world due to the lack of a suitable vaccine; therefore the early prediction of those infected with this virus is extremely important attempting to control it by quarantining the infected people and giving them possible medical attention to limit its spread. This work suggests a model for predicting the COVID 19 virus using feature selection techniques. The proposed model consists of three stages which include the preprocessing stage, the features selection stage, and the classification stage. This work uses a data set consists of 8571 records, with forty features for patients from different countries. Two feature selection techniques are used in order to select the best features that affect the prediction of the proposed model. These are the Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) as wrapper feature selection and the Extra Tree Classifier (ETC) as embedded feature selection. Two classification methods are applied for classifying the features vectors which include the Naïve Bayesian method and Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) method. The results were 56.181%, 97.906% respectively when classifying all features and 66.329%, 99.924% respectively when classifying the best ten features using features selection techniques.