Using machine learning on clinical data to identify unexpected patterns in groups of COVID-19 patients

As clinicians are faced with a deluge of clinical data, data science can play an important role in highlighting key features driving patient outcomes, aiding in the development of new clinical hypotheses. Insight derived from machine learning can serve as a clinical support tool by connecting care providers with reliable results from big data analysis that identify previously undetected clinical patterns. In this work, we show an example of collaboration between clinicians and data scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying sub-groups of COVID-19 patients with unanticipated outcomes or who are high-risk for severe disease or death. We apply a random forest classifier model to predict adverse patient outcomes early in the disease course, and we connect our classification results to unsupervised clustering of patient features that may underpin patient risk. The paradigm for using data science for hypothesis generation and clinical decision support, as well as our triaged classification approach and unsupervised clustering methods to determine patient cohorts, are applicable to driving rapid hypothesis generation and iteration in a variety of clinical challenges, including future public health crises.