A novel machine learning architecture to improve classification of intermediate cases in health: workflow and case...

The practice of medicine has evolved significantly during the past decade, with the emergence of Machine Learning (ML) that offers the opportunity of personalized patient-tailored care. However, ML models still face some challenges when classifying patients where clear-cut boundaries between classes are hard to identify. In this work, we propose an ML architecture to improve the sensitivity of detecting patients in intermediate "hard-to-classify" classes.

The proposed architecture replaces a single classifier with a group of cascaded increasingly specialized classifiers: the 'Human-like', the 'Segregating', and the 'Deep' classifiers. Its effectiveness is tested, using 8 ML algorithms (Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree, Random Forest, XGBoost, CatBoost, and Artificial Neural Network) to predict the feeling of protection among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a global online survey, then validated on two other outputs.

The results show, for most algorithms, an enhanced detection of data points belonging to intermediate classes (up to 14% absolute increase in accuracy), as well as an overall improvement in the models' accuracies (up to 5.8% absolute increase). The validation experiments yielded similar results with improved accuracies for most algorithms when compared to the single classifier architecture.

This novel architecture is proving to be a very promising tool for improving accuracy of the models when classifying patients in intermediate classes, regardless of the algorithm used. Accuracy-improvement for likert-type scale measures offers an opportunity for rapidly identifying "risk-profiles" during emergencies and beyond. This applies equally to patients and healthcare providers, with potential for improving quality of care and strengthening patient-centered healthcare systems that prioritize healthcare providers' wellbeing.