Towards Machine Learning Algorithms in Predicting the Clinical Evolution of Patients Diagnosed with COVID-19

Abstract

Predictive modelling strategies can optimise the clinical diagnostic process by identifying patterns among various symptoms and risk factors, such as those presented in cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), also known as coronavirus (COVID-19). In this context, the present research proposes a comparative analysis using benchmarking techniques to evaluate and validate the performance of some classification algorithms applied to the same dataset, which contains information collected from patients diagnosed with COVID-19, registered in the Influenza Epidemiological Surveillance System (SIVEP). With this approach, 30,000 cases were analysed during the training and testing phase of the prediction models. This work proposes a comparative approach of machine learning algorithms (ML), working on the knowledge discovery task to predict clinical evolution in patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Our experiments show, through appropriate metrics, that the clinical evolution classification process of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 using the Multilayer Perceptron algorithm performs well against other ML algorithms. Its use has significant consequences for vital prognosis and agility in measures used in the first consultations in hospitals.