Association rule mining for prediction of COVID-19

COVID-19 is a raging pandemic that has created havoc with its impact ranging from loss of millions of human lives to social and economic disruptions of the entire world. The catastrophic shock of COVID-19 in India is also enormous. Currently, India has the largest number of COVID cases in Asia. Therefore, error-free prediction, quick diagnosis, disease identification, isolation and treatment of a COVID patient have become extremely important. Nowadays, mining knowledge and providing scientific decision making for diagnosis of diseases from clinical datasets has found wide-ranging applications in healthcare sector. In this direction, among different data mining tools, association rule mining has already emerged out as a popular technique to extract invaluable information and develop important knowledge-base to help in intelligent diagnosis of distinct diseases quickly and automatically. In this paper, an attempt is put forward to develop a predictive model based on frequent pattern growth algorithm of association rule mining to determine the likelihood of COVID-19 in a patient. It identifies breathing problem, fever, dry cough, sore throat, abroad travel and attended large gathering as the main indicators of COVID-19. Based on a large clinical dataset, a linear regression model is also proposed having an accuracy of 73.9% in correctly predicting the occurrence of COVID-19.