An efficient synthetic minority oversampling technique-based ensemble learning model to detect COVID-19 severity

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of accurately predicting disease severity to ensure timely intervention and effective allocation of healthcare resources, which can ultimately improve patient outcomes. This study aims to develop an efficient machine learning (ML) model based on patient demographic and clinical data. It utilizes advanced feature engineering techniques to reduce the dimensionality of dataset and address the issue of highly imbalanced data using synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). The study employs several ensemble learning models, including XGBoost, Random Forest, AdaBoost, voting ensemble, enhanced-weighted voting ensemble, and stack-based ensembles with support vector machine (SVM) and Gaussian Naïve Bayes as meta-learners, to develop the proposed model. The results indicate that the proposed model outperformed the top-performing models reported in previous studies. It achieved an accuracy of 0.978, sensitivity of 1.0, precision of 0.875, F1-score of 0.934, and receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.965. The study identified several features that significantly correlated with COVID-19 severity, which included respiratory rate (breaths per minute), c-reactive proteins, age, and total leukocyte count (TLC) count. The proposed approach presents a promising method for accurate COVID-19 severity prediction, which may prove valuable in assisting healthcare providers in making informed decisions about patient care.