COVID-19 diagnosis prediction by symptoms of tested individuals: a machine learning approach

Zoabi, Y.; Shomron, N.

Effective screening of SARS-CoV-2 enables quick and efficient diagnosis of COVID-19 and can mitigate the burden on healthcare systems. Prediction models that combine several features to estimate the risk of infection have been developed in hopes of assisting medical staff worldwide in triaging patients when allocating limited healthcare resources. We established a machine learning approach that trained on records from 51,831 tested individuals (of whom 4,769 were confirmed COVID-19 cases) while the test set contained data from the following week (47,401 tested individuals of whom 3,624 were confirmed COVID-19 cases). Our model predicts COVID-19 test results with high accuracy using only 8 features: gender, whether the age is above 60, information about close contact with an infected individual, and 5 initial clinical symptoms. Overall, using nationwide data representing the general population, we developed a model that enables screening suspected COVID-19 patients according to simple features accessed by asking them basic questions. Our model can be used, among other considerations, to prioritize testing for COVID-19 when allocating limited testing resources.