Modelling and Simulation of COVID-19 Outbreak Prediction Using Supervised Machine Learning

Novel Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) is a newer type of coronavirus that has not been formally detected in humans. It is established that this disease often affects people of different age groups, particularly those with body disorders, blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems, or weakened immune systems. The epidemic of this infection has recently had a huge impact on people around the globe with rising mortality rates. Rising levels of mortality are attributed to their transmitting behavior through physical contact between humans. It is extremely necessary to monitor the transmission of the infection and also to anticipate the early stages of the disease in such a way that the appropriate timing of effective precautionary measures can be taken. The latest global coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19) has brought new challenges to the scientific community. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-motivated methodologies may be useful in predicting the conditions, consequences, and implications of such an outbreak. These forecasts may help to monitor and prevent the spread of these outbreaks. This article proposes a predictive framework incorporating Support Vector Machines (SVM) in the forecasting of a potential outbreak of COVID-19. The findings indicate that the suggested system outperforms cutting-edge approaches. The method could be used to predict the long-term spread of such an outbreak so that we can implement proactive measures in advance. The findings of the analyses indicate that the SVM forecasting framework outperformed the Neural Network methods in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. The proposed SVM system model exhibits 98.88% and 96.79% result in terms of accuracy during training and validation respectively.     

Intelligent Firefly Algorithm Deep Transfer Learning Based COVID-19 Monitoring System

With the increasing and rapid growth rate of COVID-19 cases, the healthcare scheme of several developed countries have reached the point of collapse. An important and critical steps in fighting against COVID-19 is powerful screening of diseased patients, in such a way that positive patient can be treated and isolated. A chest radiology image-based diagnosis scheme might have several benefits over traditional approach. The accomplishment of artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques in automated diagnoses in the healthcare sector and rapid increase in COVID-19 cases have demanded the requirement of AI based automated diagnosis and recognition systems. This study develops an Intelligent Firefly Algorithm Deep Transfer Learning Based COVID-19 Monitoring System (IFFA-DTLMS). The proposed IFFA-DTLMS model majorly aims at identifying and categorizing the occurrence of COVID19 on chest radiographs. To attain this, the presented IFFA-DTLMS model primarily applies densely connected networks (DenseNet121) model to generate a collection of feature vectors. In addition, the firefly algorithm (FFA) is applied for the hyper parameter optimization of DenseNet121 model. Moreover, autoencoder-long short term memory (AE-LSTM) model is exploited for the classification and identification of COVID19. For ensuring the enhanced performance of the IFFA-DTLMS model, a wide-ranging experiments were performed and the results are reviewed under distinctive aspects. The experimental value reports the betterment of IFFA-DTLMS model over recent approaches.     

Impact Assessment of COVID-19 Pandemic Through Machine Learning Models

Ever since its outbreak in the Wuhan city of China, COVID-19 pandemic has engulfed more than 211 countries in the world, leaving a trail of unprecedented fatalities. Even more debilitating than the infection itself, were the restrictions like lockdowns and quarantine measures taken to contain the spread of Coronavirus. Such enforced alienation affected both the mental and social condition of people significantly. Social interactions and congregations are not only integral part of work life but also form the basis of human evolvement. However, COVID-19 brought all such communication to a grinding halt. Digital interactions have failed to enthuse the fervor that one enjoys in face-to-face meets. The pandemic has shoved the entire planet into an unstable state. The main focus and aim of the proposed study is to assess the impact of the pandemic on different aspects of the society in Saudi Arabia. To achieve this objective, the study analyzes two perspectives: the early approach, and the late approach of COVID-19 and the consequent effects on different aspects of the society. We used a Machine Learning based framework for the prediction of the impact of COVID-19 on the key aspects of society. Findings of this research study indicate that financial resources were the worst affected. Several countries are facing economic upheavals due to the pandemic and COVID-19 has had a considerable impact on the lives as well as the livelihoods of people. Yet the damage is not irretrievable and the world’s societies can emerge out of this setback through concerted efforts in all facets of life.     

Optimal Synergic Deep Learning for COVID-19 Classification Using Chest X-Ray Images

A chest radiology scan can significantly aid the early diagnosis and management of COVID-19 since the virus attacks the lungs. Chest X-ray (CXR) gained much interest after the COVID-19 outbreak thanks to its rapid imaging time, widespread availability, low cost, and portability. In radiological investigations, computer-aided diagnostic tools are implemented to reduce intra- and inter-observer variability. Using lately industrialized Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and radiological techniques to diagnose and classify disease is advantageous. The current study develops an automatic identification and classification model for CXR pictures using Gaussian Filtering based Optimized Synergic Deep Learning using Remora Optimization Algorithm (GF-OSDL-ROA). This method is inclusive of preprocessing and classification based on optimization. The data is preprocessed using Gaussian filtering (GF) to remove any extraneous noise from the image’s edges. Then, the OSDL model is applied to classify the CXRs under different severity levels based on CXR data. The learning rate of OSDL is optimized with the help of ROA for COVID-19 diagnosis showing the novelty of the work. OSDL model, applied in this study, was validated using the COVID-19 dataset. The experiments were conducted upon the proposed OSDL model, which achieved a classification accuracy of 99.83%, while the current Convolutional Neural Network achieved less classification accuracy, i.e., 98.14%.     

Machine Learning Approach for COVID-19 Detection on Twitter

Social networking services (SNSs) provide massive data that can be a very influential source of information during pandemic outbreaks. This study shows that social media analysis can be used as a crisis detector (e.g., understanding the sentiment of social media users regarding various pandemic outbreaks). The novel Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19), commonly known as coronavirus, has affected everyone worldwide in 2020. Streaming Twitter data have revealed the status of the COVID-19 outbreak in the most affected regions. This study focuses on identifying COVID-19 patients using tweets without requiring medical records to find the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages (tweets). For this purpose, we propose herein an intelligent model using traditional machine learning-based approaches, such as support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), naïve Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), and decision tree (DT) with the help of the term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to detect the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages. The proposed intelligent traditional machine learning-based model classifies Twitter messages into four categories, namely, confirmed deaths, recovered, and suspected. For the experimental analysis, the tweet data on the COVID-19 pandemic are analyzed to evaluate the results of traditional machine learning approaches. A benchmark dataset for COVID-19 on Twitter messages is developed and can be used for future research studies. The experiments show that the results of the proposed approach are promising in detecting the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages with overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score between 70% and 80% and the confusion matrix for machine learning approaches (i.e., SVM, NB, LR, RF, and DT) with the TF-IDF feature extraction technique.     

Deep Learning Approach for Analysis and Characterization of COVID-19

Early diagnosis of a pandemic disease like COVID-19 can help deal with a dire situation and help radiologists and other experts manage human resources more effectively. In a recent pandemic, laboratories perform diagnostics manually, which requires a lot of time and expertise of the laboratorial technicians to yield accurate results. Moreover, the cost of kits is high, and well-equipped labs are needed to perform this test. Therefore, other means of diagnosis is highly desirable. Radiography is one of the existing methods that finds its use in the diagnosis of COVID-19. The radiography observes change in Computed Tomography (CT) chest images of patients, developing a deep learning-based method to extract graphical features which are used for automated diagnosis of the disease ahead of laboratory-based testing. The proposed work suggests an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technique for rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 from given volumetric chest CT images of patients by extracting its visual features and then using these features in the deep learning module. The proposed convolutional neural network aims to classify the infectious and non-infectious SARS-COV2 subjects. The proposed network utilizes 746 chests scanned CT images of 349 images belonging to COVID-19 positive cases, while 397 belong to negative cases of COVID-19. Our experiment resulted in an accuracy of 98.4%, sensitivity of 98.5%, specificity of 98.3%, precision of 97.1%, and F1-score of 97.8%. The additional parameters of classification error, mean absolute error (MAE), root-mean-square error (RMSE), and Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC) are used to evaluate our proposed work. The obtained result shows the outstanding performance for the classification of infectious and non-infectious for COVID-19 cases.     

On the Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-Ray Images Using CNN-Based Transfer Learning

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an extremely infectious disease and possibly causes acute respiratory distress or in severe cases may lead to death. There has already been some research in dealing with coronavirus using machine learning algorithms, but few have presented a truly comprehensive view. In this research, we show how convolutional neural network (CNN) can be useful to detect COVID-19 using chest X-ray images. We leverage the CNN-based pre-trained models as feature extractors to substantiate transfer learning and add our own classifier in detecting COVID-19. In this regard, we evaluate performance of five different pre-trained models with fine-tuning the weights from some of the top layers. We also develop an ensemble model where the predictions from all chosen pre-trained models are combined to generate a single output. The models are evaluated through 5-fold cross validation using two publicly available data repositories containing healthy and infected (both COVID-19 and other pneumonia) chest X-ray images. We also leverage two different visualization techniques to observe how efficiently the models extract important features related to the detection of COVID- 19 patients. The models show high degree of accuracy, precision, and sensitivity. We believe that the models will aid medical professionals with improved and faster patient screening and pave a way to further COVID-19 research.     

Prediction of COVID-19 Cases Using Machine Learning for Effective Public Health Management

COVID-19 is a pandemic that has affected nearly every country in the world. At present, sustainable development in the area of public health is considered vital to securing a promising and prosperous future for humans. However, widespread diseases, such as COVID-19, create numerous challenges to this goal, and some of those challenges are not yet defined. In this study, a Shallow Single-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (SSLPNN) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model were used for the classification and prediction of confirmed COVID-19 cases in five geographically distributed regions of Asia with diverse settings and environmental conditions: namely, China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Significant environmental and non-environmental features were taken as the input dataset, and confirmed COVID-19 cases were taken as the output dataset. A correlation analysis was done to identify patterns in the cases related to fluctuations in the associated variables. The results of this study established that the population and air quality index of a region had a statistically significant influence on the cases. However, age and the human development index had a negative influence on the cases. The proposed SSLPNN-based classification model performed well when predicting the classes of confirmed cases. During training, the binary classification model was highly accurate, with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.91. Likewise, the results of the regression analysis using the GPR technique with Matern 5/2 were highly accurate (RMSE = 0.95239) when predicting the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in an area. However, dynamic management has occupied a core place in studies on the sustainable development of public health but dynamic management depends on proactive strategies based on statistically verified approaches, like Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this study, an SSLPNN model has been trained to fit public health associated data into an appropriate class, allowing GPR to predict the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in an area based on the given values of selected parameters. Therefore, this tool can help authorities in different ecological settings effectively manage COVID-19.     

Efficient Deep CNN Model for COVID-19 Classification

Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection was initially acknowledged as a global pandemic in Wuhan in China. World Health Organization (WHO) stated that the COVID-19 is an epidemic that causes a 3.4% death rate. Chest X-Ray (CXR) and Computerized Tomography (CT) screening of infected persons are essential in diagnosis applications. There are numerous ways to identify positive COVID-19 cases. One of the fundamental ways is radiology imaging through CXR, or CT images. The comparison of CT and CXR scans revealed that CT scans are more effective in the diagnosis process due to their high quality. Hence, automated classification techniques are required to facilitate the diagnosis process. Deep Learning (DL) is an effective tool that can be utilized for detection and classification this type of medical images. The deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can learn and extract essential features from different medical image datasets. In this paper, a CNN architecture for automated COVID-19 detection from CXR and CT images is offered. Three activation functions as well as three optimizers are tested and compared for this task. The proposed architecture is built from scratch and the COVID-19 image datasets are directly fed to train it. The performance is tested and investigated on the CT and CXR datasets. Three activation functions: Tanh, Sigmoid, and ReLU are compared using a constant learning rate and different batch sizes. Different optimizers are studied with different batch sizes and a constant learning rate. Finally, a comparison between different combinations of activation functions and optimizers is presented, and the optimal configuration is determined. Hence, the main objective is to improve the detection accuracy of COVID-19 from CXR and CT images using DL by employing CNNs to classify medical COVID-19 images in an early stage. The proposed model achieves a classification accuracy of 91.67% on CXR image dataset, and a classification accuracy of 100% on CT dataset with training times of 58 min and 46 min on CXR and CT datasets, respectively. The best results are obtained using the ReLU activation function combined with the SGDM optimizer at a learning rate of 10⁻⁵ and a minibatch size of 16.     

Bayesian Rule Modeling for Interpretable Mortality Classification of COVID-19 Patients

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been termed a “Pandemic Disease” that has infected many people and caused many deaths on a nearly unprecedented level. As more people are infected each day, it continues to pose a serious threat to humanity worldwide. As a result, healthcare systems around the world are facing a shortage of medical space such as wards and sickbeds. In most cases, healthy people experience tolerable symptoms if they are infected. However, in other cases, patients may suffer severe symptoms and require treatment in an intensive care unit. Thus, hospitals should select patients who have a high risk of death and treat them first. To solve this problem, a number of models have been developed for mortality prediction. However, they lack interpretability and generalization. To prepare a model that addresses these issues, we proposed a COVID-19 mortality prediction model that could provide new insights. We identified blood factors that could affect the prediction of COVID-19 mortality. In particular, we focused on dependency reduction using partial correlation and mutual information. Next, we used the Class-Attribute Interdependency Maximization (CAIM) algorithm to bin continuous values. Then, we used Jensen Shannon Divergence (JSD) and Bayesian posterior probability to create less redundant and more accurate rules. We provided a ruleset with its own posterior probability as a result. The extracted rules are in the form of “if antecedent then results, posterior probability()”. If the sample matches the extracted rules, then the result is positive. The average AUC Score was 96.77% for the validation dataset and the F1-score was 92.8% for the test data. Compared to the results of previous studies, it shows good performance in terms of classification performance, generalization, and interpretability.     

Supervised Machine Learning-Based Prediction of COVID-19

COVID-19 turned out to be an infectious and life-threatening viral disease, and its swift and overwhelming spread has become one of the greatest challenges for the world. As yet, no satisfactory vaccine or medication has been developed that could guarantee its mitigation, though several efforts and trials are underway. Countries around the globe are striving to overcome the COVID-19 spread and while they are finding out ways for early detection and timely treatment. In this regard, healthcare experts, researchers and scientists have delved into the investigation of existing as well as new technologies. The situation demands development of a clinical decision support system to equip the medical staff ways to timely detect this disease. The state-of-the-art research in Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML) and cloud computing have encouraged healthcare experts to find effective detection schemes. This study aims to provide a comprehensive review of the role of AI & ML in investigating prediction techniques for the COVID-19. A mathematical model has been formulated to analyze and detect its potential threat. The proposed model is a cloud-based smart detection algorithm using support vector machine (CSDC-SVM) with cross-fold validation testing. The experimental results have achieved an accuracy of 98.4% with 15-fold cross-validation strategy. The comparison with similar state-of-the-art methods reveals that the proposed CSDC-SVM model possesses better accuracy and efficiency.     

Facilities for Centralized Isolation and Quarantine for the Observation and Treatment of Patients with COVID-19

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic increased the burden on many healthcare systems and in the process, exposed the need for medical resources and physical space. While few studies discussed the efficient utilization of medical resources and physical space so far. Therefore, this study aimed to summarize experiences related to facilities used for centralized isolation for medical observation and treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic in China and to provide suggestions to further improve the management of confirmed cases, suspected cases, and close contacts. In China, three types of facilities for centralized isolation (Fangcang shelter hospitals, refitted non-designated hospitals, and quarantine hotels) underwent retrofitting for the treatment and isolation of confirmed and suspected cases. These facilities mitigated the immediate high demand for space. Moreover, in order to minimize infection risks in these facilities, regulators and governmental agencies implemented new designs, management measures, and precautionary measures to minimize infection risk. Other countries and regions could refer to China's experience in optimally allocating social resources in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a conclusion, government should allocate social resources and construct centralized isolation and quarantine facilities for an emergency response, health authorities should issue regulations for centralized isolation facilities and pay strict attention to the daily management of these facilities, a multidisciplinary administration team is required to support the daily operation of a centralized isolation facility, in-depth studies and international collaboration on the centralized isolation policy are encouraged.     

EEG-Based Neonatal Sleep Stage Classification Using Ensemble Learning

Sleep stage classification can provide important information regarding neonatal brain development and maturation. Visual annotation, using polysomnography (PSG), is considered as a gold standard for neonatal sleep stage classification. However, visual annotation is time consuming and needs professional neurologists. For this reason, an internet of things and ensemble-based automatic sleep stage classification has been proposed in this study. 12 EEG features, from 9 bipolar channels, were used to train and test the base classifiers including convolutional neural network, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron. Bagging and stacking ensembles are then used to combine the outputs for final classification. The proposed algorithm can reach a mean kappa of 0.73 and 0.66 for 2-stage and 3-stage (wake, active sleep, and quiet sleep) classification, respectively. The proposed network works as a semi-real time application because a smoothing filter is used to hold the sleep stage for 3 min. The high-performance parameters and its ability to work in semi real-time makes it a promising candidate for use in hospitalized newborn infants.     

Sparrow Search Optimization with Transfer Learning-Based Crowd Density Classification

Due to the rapid increase in urbanization and population, crowd gatherings are frequently observed in the form of concerts, political, and religious meetings. HAJJ is one of the well-known crowding events that takes place every year in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Crowd density estimation and crowd monitoring are significant research areas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The current research study develops a new Sparrow Search Optimization with Deep Transfer Learning based Crowd Density Detection and Classification (SSODTL-CD2C) model. The presented SSODTL-CD2C technique majorly focuses on the identification and classification of crowd densities. To attain this, SSODTL-CD2C technique exploits Oppositional Salp Swarm Optimization Algorithm (OSSA) with EfficientNet model to derive the feature vectors. At the same time, Stacked Sparse Auto Encoder (SSAE) model is utilized for the classification of crowd densities. Finally, SSO algorithm is employed for optimal fine-tuning of the parameters involved in SSAE mechanism. The performance of the proposed SSODTL-CD2C technique was validated using a dataset with four different kinds of crowd densities. The obtained results demonstrated that the proposed SSODTL-CD2C methodology accomplished an excellent crowd classification performance with a maximum accuracy of 93.25%. So, the proposed method will be highly helpful in managing HAJJ and other crowded events.     

Intelligent Forecasting Model of COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak Empowered with Deep Extreme Learning Machine

An epidemic is a quick and widespread disease that threatens many lives and damages the economy. The epidemic lifetime should be accurate so that timely and remedial steps are determined. These include the closing of borders schools, suspension of community and commuting services. The forecast of an outbreak effectively is a very necessary but difficult task. A predictive model that provides the best possible forecast is a great challenge for machine learning with only a few samples of training available. This work proposes and examines a prediction model based on a deep extreme learning machine (DELM). This methodology is used to carry out an experiment based on the recent Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. An optimized prediction model that has been developed, namely DELM, is demonstrated to be able to make a prediction that is fairly best. The results show that the new methodology is useful in developing an appropriate forecast when the samples are far from abundant during the critical period of the disease. During the investigation, it is shown that the proposed approach has the highest accuracy rate of 97.59% with 70% of training, 30% of test and validation. Simulation results validate the prediction effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

An Application Review of Artificial Intelligence in Prevention and Cure of COVID-19 Pandemic

Coronaviruses are a well-known family of viruses that can infect humans or animals. Recently, the new coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread worldwide. All countries in the world are working hard to control the coronavirus disease. However, many countries are faced with a lack of medical equipment and an insufficient number of medical personnel because of the limitations of the medical system, which leads to the mass spread of diseases. As a powerful tool, artificial intelligence (AI) has been successfully applied to solve various complex problems ranging from big data analysis to computer vision. In the process of epidemic control, many algorithms are proposed to solve problems in various fields of medical treatment, which is able to reduce the workload of the medical system. Due to excellent learning ability, AI has played an important role in drug development, epidemic forecast, and clinical diagnosis. This research provides a comprehensive overview of relevant research on AI during the outbreak and helps to develop new and more powerful methods to deal with the current pandemic.     

Optimal Machine Learning Driven Sentiment Analysis on COVID-19 Twitter Data

The outbreak of the pandemic, caused by Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), has affected the daily activities of people across the globe. During COVID-19 outbreak and the successive lockdowns, Twitter was heavily used and the number of tweets regarding COVID-19 increased tremendously. Several studies used Sentiment Analysis (SA) to analyze the emotions expressed through tweets upon COVID-19. Therefore, in current study, a new Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) with Machine Learning-driven SA (ABCML-SA) model is developed for conducting Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Twitter data. The prime focus of the presented ABCML-SA model is to recognize the sentiments expressed in tweets made upon COVID-19. It involves data pre-processing at the initial stage followed by n-gram based feature extraction to derive the feature vectors. For identification and classification of the sentiments, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) model is exploited. At last, the ABC algorithm is applied to fine tune the parameters involved in SVM. To demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed ABCML-SA model, a sequence of simulations was conducted. The comparative assessment results confirmed the effectual performance of the proposed ABCML-SA model over other approaches.     

Clinical Characteristics and Outcomes of Type 2 Diabetes Patients Infected with COVID-19: A Retrospective Study

Diabetes and its related metabolic disorders have been reported as the leading comorbidities in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This clinical study aims to investigate the clinical features, radiographic and laboratory tests, complications, treatments, and clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients with or without diabetes. This retrospective study included 208 hospitalized patients (≥ 45 years old) with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 during the period between 12 January and 25 March 2020. Information from the medical record, including clinical features, radiographic and laboratory tests, complications, treatments, and clinical outcomes, were extracted for the analysis. 96 (46.2%) patients had comorbidity with type 2 diabetes. In COVID-19 patients with type 2 diabetes, the coexistence of hypertension (58.3% vs 31.2%), coronary heart disease (17.1% vs 8.0%), and chronic kidney diseases (6.2% vs 0%) was significantly higher than in COVID-19 patients without type 2 diabetes. The frequency and degree of abnormalities in computed tomography (CT) chest scans in COVID-19 patients with type 2 diabetes were markedly increased, including ground-glass opacity (85.6% vs 64.9%, P < 0.001) and bilateral patchy shadowing (76.7% vs 37.8%, P < 0.001). In addition, the levels of blood glucose (7.23 mmol·L⁻¹ (interquartile range (IQR): 5.80–9.29) vs 5.46 mmol·L⁻¹ (IQR: 5.00–6.46)), blood low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) (2.21 mmol·L⁻¹ (IQR: 1.67–2.76) vs 1.75 mmol·L⁻¹ (IQR: 1.27–2.01)), and systolic pressure (130 mmHg (IQR: 120–142) vs 122 mmHg (IQR: 110–137)) (1 mmHg = 133.3 Pa) in COVID-19 patients with diabetes were significantly higher than in patients without diabetes (P < 0.001). The coexistence of type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders is common in patients with COVID-19, which may potentiate the morbidity and aggravate COVID-19 progression. Optimal management of the metabolic hemostasis of glucose and lipids is the key to ensuring better clinical outcomes. Increased clinical vigilance is warranted for COVID-19 patients with diabetes and other metabolic diseases that are fundamental and chronic conditions.