Predicting Risk of Mortality in COVID-19 Hospitalized Patients using Hybrid Machine Learning Algorithms

Background: Since hospitalized patients with COVID-19 are considered at high risk of death, the patients with the sever clinical condition should be identified. De-spite the potential of machine learning (ML) techniques to predict the mortality of COVID-19 patients, high-dimensional data is considered a challenge, which can be addressed by metaheuristic and nature-inspired algorithms, such as genetic algorithm (GA). Objective: This paper aimed to compare the efficiency of the GA with several ML techniques to predict COVID-19 in-hospital mortality. Material and Methods: In this retrospective study, 1353 COVID-19 in-hospi-tal patients were examined from February 9 to December 20, 2020. The GA technique was applied to select the important features, then using selected features several ML algorithms such as K-nearest-neighbor (K-NN), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were trained to design predictive models. Finally, some evaluation metrics were used for the comparison of devel-oped models. Results: A total of 10 features out of 56 were selected, including length of stay (LOS), age, cough, respiratory intubation, dyspnea, cardiovascular diseases, leukocy-tosis, blood urea nitrogen (BUN), C-reactive protein, and pleural effusion by 10-inde-pendent execution of GA. The GA-SVM had the best performance with the accuracy and specificity of 9.5147e+01 and 9.5112e+01, respectively. Conclusion: The hybrid ML models, especially the GA-SVM, can improve the treatment of COVID-19 patients, predict severe disease and mortality, and optimize the utilization of health resources based on the improvement of input features and the adaption of the structure of the models. © 2022, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.