A Machine Learning Model Reveals Older Age and Delayed Hospitalization as Predictors of Mortality in Patients with COVID-19

ABSTRACT Objective The recent pandemic of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is increasingly causing severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and significant mortality. We aim here to identify the risk factors associated with mortality of coronavirus infected persons using a supervised machine learning approach. Research Design and Methods Clinical data of 1085 cases of COVID-19 from 13 th January to 28 th February, 2020 was obtained from Kaggle, an online community of Data scientists. 430 cases were selected for the final analysis. Random Forest classification algorithm was implemented on the dataset to identify the important predictors and their effects on mortality. Results The Area under the ROC curve obtained during model validation on the test dataset was 0.97. Age was the most important variable in predicting mortality followed by the time gap between symptom onset and hospitalization. Conclusions Patients aged beyond 62 years are at higher risk of fatality whereas hospitalization within 2 days of the onset of symptoms could reduce mortality in COVID-19 patients.