Analysis of Machine Learning Methods for COVID-19 Detection Using Serum Raman Spectroscopy

ABSTRACT

One of the most challenging aspects of the emergent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by infection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has been the need for massive diagnostic tests to detect and track infection rates at the population level. Current tests such as reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction can be low-throughput and labor intensive. An ultra-fast and accurate mode of detecting COVID-19 infection is crucial for healthcare workers to make informed decisions in fast-paced clinical settings. The high-dimensional, feature-rich components of Raman spectra and validated predictive power for identifying human disease, cancer, as well as bacterial and viral infections pose the potential to train a supervised classification machine learning algorithm on Raman spectra of patient serum samples to detect COVID-19 infection. We developed a novel stacked subsemble classifier model coupled with an iteratively validated and automated feature selection and engineering workflow to predict COVID-19 infection status from Raman spectra of 250 human serum samples, with a 10-fold cross-validated classification accuracy of 98.0% (98.6% precision and 98.5% recall). Furthermore, we benchmarked nine machine learning and artificial neural network models when evaluated using eight standalone performance metrics to assess whether ensemble methods offered any improvement from baseline machine learning models. Using a rank-normalized scores derived from the performance metrics, the stacked subsemble model ranked higher than the Multi-layer Perceptron, which in turn ranked higher than the eight other machine learning models. This study serves as a proof of concept that stacked ensemble machine learning models are a powerful predictive tool for COVID-19 diagnostics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Applied Artificial Intelligence is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)