Machine Learning and OLAP on Big COVID-19 Data

In the current technological era, huge amounts of big data are generated and collected from a wide variety of rich data sources. These big data can be of different levels of veracity in the sense that some of them are precise while some others are imprecise and uncertain. Embedded in these big data are useful information and valuable knowledge to be discovered. An example of these big data is healthcare and epidemiological data such as data related to patients who suffered from epidemic diseases like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Knowledge discovered from these epidemiological data-via data science techniques such as machine learning, data mining, and online analytical processing (OLAP)-helps researchers, epidemiologists and policy makers to get a better understanding of the disease, which may inspire them to come up ways to detect, control and combat the disease. In this paper, we present a machine learning and big data analytic tool for processing and analyzing COVID-19 epidemiological data. Specifically, the tool makes good use of taxonomy and OLAP to generalize some specific attributes into some generalized attributes for effective big data analytics. Instead of ignoring unknown or unstated values of some attributes, the tool provides users with flexibility of including or excluding these values, depending on their preference and applications. Moreover, the tool discovers frequent patterns and their related patterns, which help reveal some useful knowledge such as absolute and relative frequency of the patterns. Furthermore, the tool learns from the patterns discovered from historical data and predicts useful information such as clinical outcomes for future data. As such, the tool helps users to get a better understanding of information about the confirmed cases of COVID-19. Although this tool is designed for machine learning and analytics of big epidemiological data, it would be applicable to machine learning and analytics of big data in many other real-life applications and services.