Potential Pathological, Clinical, and Symptomatic Findings of COVID-19 to Predict Mortality in Positive PCR Individuals Using Data Mining

COVID-19 has placed immense burdens on healthcare systems and medical staff. To avoid spread, the statistician’s role and the use of appropriate predictive models -prediction of survivors versus non-survivors- is highly relevant. This study aimed to apply a model which avoids overfitting and selection bias towards selecting predictors to predict COVID-19 mortality.

The Conditional Inference Tree (CIT) model was used. Data from 59,564 hospitalized individuals with positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test results were collected from February 20, 2020, to September 12, 2021, in the Khorasan Razavi province, Iran.

The sensitivity and specificity of the model were 88.7% and 88.1%, respectively, the accuracy was 88.2%, and the area under the curve (AUC) was 73.0% on test data. Therefore, the model had considerable accuracy in prediction. The potential predictors involved in predicting survivors versus non-survivors were intubation, age, PO2 level, decreased consciousness level, presence of distress, anorexia, drug use, and kidney diseases.

According to the findings, the CIT model showed high accuracy by avoiding overfitting and selection bias toward selecting predictors. Thus, the results of this study and the efforts of healthcare systems to stop the spread of this pandemic prove helpful.