Utilizing machine learning to predict hospital admissions for pediatric COVID-19 patients (PrepCOVID-Machine)

The COVID-19 pandemic has burdened healthcare systems globally. To curb high hospital admission rates, only patients with genuine medical needs are admitted. However, machine learning (ML) models to predict COVID-19 hospitalization in Asian children are lacking. This study aimed to develop and validate ML models to predict pediatric COVID-19 hospitalization. We collected secondary data with 2200 patients and 65 variables from Malaysian aged 0 to 12 with COVID-19 between 1st February 2020 and 31st March 2022. The sample was partitioned into training, internal, and external validation groups. Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) was employed for feature selection, and we trained seven supervised classifiers. Grid Search was used to optimize the hyperparameters of each algorithm. The study analyzed 1988 children and 30 study variables after data were processed. The RFE algorithm selected 12 highly predicted variables for COVID-19 hospitalization, including age, male sex, fever, cough, rhinorrhea, shortness of breath, vomiting, diarrhea, seizures, body temperature, chest indrawing, and abnormal breath sounds. With external validation, Adaptive Boosting was the highest-performing classifier (AUROC = 0.95) to predict COVID-19 hospital admission in children. We validated AdaBoost as the best to predict COVID-19 hospitalization among children. This model may assist front-line clinicians in making medical disposition decisions.