EFS-XGBoost: A robust framework for precision classification of COVID-19 cases

Abstract

The emergence of the novel COVID-19 virus has had a profound impact on global healthcare systems and economies, underscoring the imperative need for the development of precise and expeditious diagnostic tools. Machine learning techniques have emerged as a promising avenue for augmenting the capabilities of medical professionals in disease diagnosis and classification. In this research, the EFS-XGBoost classifier model, a robust approach for the classification of patients afflicted with COVID-19 is proposed. The key innovation in the proposed model lies in the Ensemble-based Feature Selection (EFS) strategy, which enables the judicious selection of relevant features from the expansive COVID-19 dataset. Subsequently, the power of the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier to make precise distinctions among COVID-19-infected patients is harnessed.The EFS methodology amalgamates five distinctive feature selection techniques, encompassing correlation-based, chi-squared, information gain, symmetric uncertainty-based, and gain ratio approaches. To evaluate the effectiveness of the model, comprehensive experiments were conducted using a COVID-19 dataset procured from Kaggle, and the implementation was executed using Python programming. The performance of the proposed EFS-XGBoost model was gauged by employing well-established metrics that measure classification accuracy, including accuracy, precision, recall, and the F1-Score. Furthermore, an in-depth comparative analysis was conducted by considering the performance of the XGBoost classifier under various scenarios: employing all features within the dataset without any feature selection technique, and utilizing each feature selection technique in isolation. The meticulous evaluation reveals that the proposed EFS-XGBoost model excels in performance, achieving an astounding accuracy rate of 99.8%, surpassing the efficacy of other prevailing feature selection techniques. This research not only advances the field of COVID-19 patient classification but also underscores the potency of ensemble-based feature selection in conjunction with the XGBoost classifier as a formidable tool in the realm of medical diagnosis and classification.