Automatic COVID-19 prediction using explainable machine learning techniques

The coronavirus is considered this century's most disruptive catastrophe and global concern. This disease has prompted extreme social, psychological and economic impacts affecting millions of people around the globe. COVID-19 is transmitted from one infected person's body to another through respiratory droplets. This virus proliferates when people breathe in air-contaminated space with droplets and microscopic airborne particles. This research aims to analyze automatic COVID-19 detection using machine learning techniques to build an intelligent web application. The dataset has been preprocessed by dropping null values, feature engineering, and synthetic oversampling (SMOTE) techniques. Next, we trained and evaluated different classifiers, i.e., logistic regression, random forest, decision tree, k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine (SVM), ensemble models (adaptive boosting and extreme gradient boosting) and deep learning (artificial neural network, convolutional neural network and long short-term memory) techniques. Explainable AI with the LIME framework has been applied to interpret the prediction results. The hybrid CNN-LSTM algorithm with the SMOTE approach performed better than the other models on the employed open-source dataset obtained from the Israeli Ministry of Health website, with 96.34% accuracy and a 0.98 F1 score. Finally, this model was chosen to deploy the proposed prediction system to a website, where users may acquire an instantaneous COVID-19 prognosis based on their symptoms. © 2023 The Authors