Machine-Learning Approaches in COVID-19 Survival Analysis and Discharge-Time Likelihood Prediction Using Clinical Data

As a highly contagious respiratory disease, COVID-19 has yielded high mortality rates since its emergence in December 2019. As the number of COVID-19 cases soars in epicenters, health officials are warning about the possibility of the designated treatment centers being overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. In this study, several computational techniques are implemented to analyze the survival characteristics of 1,182 patients. The computational results agree with the outcome reported in early clinical reports released for a group of patients from China that confirmed a higher mortality rate in men compared with women and in older age groups. The discharge-time prediction of COVID-19 patients was also evaluated using different machine-learning and statistical analysis methods. The results indicate that the Gradient Boosting survival model outperforms other models for patient survival prediction in this study. This research study is aimed to help health officials make more educated decisions during the outbreak.