Assessing Hospitalization for SARS-CoV-2 Confirmed Cases by a Cross-Entropy Weighted Ensemble Classifier

The potential need of hospitalization for patients with acute respiratory COVID-19 infection caused by the SARS-CoV2 virus is a critical decision, as it has a direct effect on the potential response. In addition, it leads to an allocation of resources (bed, care, and medical personnel) that, given the pandemic, are limited. According to official information reported since March 1, 2020 and updated to June 30, 2021, an ensemble of classifiers weighted by the cross-entropy information measure is proposed. We considered data based on the knowledge of a set of features before a wide availability of vaccines or identified variants of the virus were present. The aim is to contribute toward the enhancement of a better-informed assessment of risk by the general population when exposed to the disease in the aforementioned period. The results show an improvement in the detection of cases susceptible to hospitalization, with an accuracy of 91.46%, and in a restrictive scenario, there is a preventive alert to patients, even though under the established criteria should not be admitted, to remain under monitoring to anticipate the evolution of the disease to a severe stage. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Machine learning techniques for sequence-based prediction of viral-host interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease-19), a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has been declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. Over 15 million people have already been affected worldwide by COVID-19, resulting in more than 0.6 million deaths. Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play a key role in the cellular process of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection in the human body. Recently a study has reported some SARS-CoV-2 proteins that interact with several human proteins while many potential interactions remain to be identified. METHOD: In this article, various machine learning models are built to predict the PPIs between the virus and human proteins that are further validated using biological experiments. The classification models are prepared based on different sequence-based features of human proteins like amino acid composition, pseudo amino acid composition, and conjoint triad. RESULT: We have built an ensemble voting classifier using SVMRadial, SVMPolynomial, and Random Forest technique that gives a greater accuracy, precision, specificity, recall, and F1 score compared to all other models used in the work. A total of 1326 potential human target proteins of SARS-CoV-2 have been predicted by the proposed ensemble model and validated using gene ontology and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis. Several repurposable drugs targeting the predicted interactions are also reported. CONCLUSION: This study may encourage the identification of potential targets for more effective anti-COVID drug discovery.