ABSTRACT
This study aimed to build an machine learning based model to predict the COVID-19 severity and reveal risk factors related to COVID-19 severity based on laboratory testing and clinical data for 420 participants, using tree-based models such as XGBoost, LightGBM, random forest. We calculated the Odds Ratios (OR) to investigate whether the top-ranked features were statistically significant for severity classification, turning out that high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) was the most important feature for determining of COVID-19 severity and XGBoost model showed the highest performance in classifying COVID-19 severity and healthy controls with F1score (0.84) and AUC (0.87). We expect that our results are of considerable significance for early screening for diagnosing COVID-19 severity, which, in turn, assist in further retrospective research for uncommon infectious diseases. © 2023 IEEE.