Deep Learning Based Multi-Label Prediction of Hospitalization for COVID-19 Cases

Health informatics is an interdisciplinary area where computer science and related disciplines meet to address problems and support healthcare and medicine. In particular, computer has played an important role in medicine. Many existing computer-based systems (e.g., machine learning models) for healthcare applications produce binary prediction (e.g., whether a patient catches a disease or not). However, there are situations in which a non-binary prediction (e.g., what is hospitalization status of a patient) is needed. As a concrete example, over the past two years, people around the world have been affected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. There have been works on binary prediction to determine whether a patient is COVID-19 positive or not. With availability of alternative methods (e.g., rapid test), such a binary prediction has become less important. Moreover, with the evolution of the disease (e.g., recent development of COVID-19 Omicron variant), multi-label prediction of the hospitalization status has become more important when compared with binary prediction on the confirmation of cases. Hence, in this paper, we present a multi-label prediction system for computer-based medical applications. Our system makes use of autoencoders (consisting of encoders and decoders) and few-shot learning to predict the hospitalization status (e.g., ICU, semi-ICU, regular wards, or no hospitalization). The prediction is important for allocation of medical resources (e.g., hospital facilities and medical staff), which in turn affect patient lives. Experimental results on real-life open datasets show that, when training with only a few data, our multilabel prediction system gave a high F1-score when predicting hospitalization status of COVID-19 cases.