Oversampling techniques for predicting COVID-19 patient length of stay

Abstract--COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that caused a global pandemic in 2019. It is highly infectious and has the following symptoms: fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, the new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, and diarrhea. These symptoms vary in severity; some people with many risk factors have been known to have lengthy hospital stays or die from the disease. In this paper, we analyze patients' electronic health records (EHR) to predict the severity of their COVID-19 infection using the length of stay (LOS) as our measurement of severity. This is an imbalanced classification problem, as many people have a shorter LOS rather than a longer one. T o combat this problem, we synthetically create alternate oversampled training data sets. Once we have this oversampled data, we run it through an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which during training has its hyperparameters tuned by using bayesian optimization. We select the model with the best F1 score and then evaluate it and discuss it. COVID-19 is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as "a respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV -2, a coronavirus discovered in 2019. The virus spreads mainly from person to person through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks" [1]. Furthermore, they add, "For people who have symptoms, illness can range from mild to severe. Adults 65 years and older and people of any age with underlying medical conditions are at higher risk for severe illness" [1].In 2019 this novel coronavirus was first detected. The highly infectious nature of this disease, combined with the respiratory nature of the infection, caused a pandemic. Along with being highly contagious, COVID-19 also has an extensive range of symptoms such as fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, the new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, and diarrhea [2]. Along with a long list of symptoms, COVID-19 has many risk factors, which may increase the severity of the infection.