Covid-19 vaccination priorities defined on machine learning

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Defining priority vaccination groups is a critical factor to reduce mortality rates. METHODS: We sought to identify priority population groups for covid-19 vaccination, based on in-hospital risk of death, by using Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine Learning (ML) algorithm. We performed a retrospective cohort study comprising 49,197 patients (18 years or older), with RT-PCR-confirmed for covid-19, who were hospitalized in any of the 336 Brazilian hospitals considered in this study, from March 19th, 2020, to March 22nd, 2021. Independent variables encompassed age, sex, and chronic health conditions grouped into 179 large categories. Primary outcome was hospital discharge or in-hospital death. Priority population groups for vaccination were formed based on the different levels of in-hospital risk of death due to covid-19, from the ML model developed by taking into consideration the independent variables. All analysis were carried out in Python programming language (version 3.7) and R programming language (version 4.05). RESULTS: Patients’ mean age was of 60.5 ± 16.8 years (mean ± SD), mean in-hospital mortality rate was 17.9%, and the mean number of comorbidities per patient was 1.97 ± 1.85 (mean ± SD). The predictive model of in-hospital death presented area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC - ROC) equal to 0.80. The investigated population was grouped into eleven (11) different risk categories, based on the variables chosen by the ML model developed in this study. CONCLUSIONS: The use of ML for defining population priorities groups for vaccination, based on risk of in-hospital death, can be easily applied by health system managers.

Applications of Social Media and Digital Technologies in COVID-19 Vaccination: Scoping Review

“…Four articles [ 135 , 136 , 138 , 139 ] tested COVID-19 mitigation strategies and the best vaccination criteria to minimize the number of infections and deaths. The remaining 5 studies [ 133 , 134 , 137 , 140 , 141 ] focused on priority groups and areas for COVID-19 vaccination. The unified Hierarchical Priority Classification-XGBoost model represented a significant improvement in predicting priorities for COVID-19 vaccination [ 133 ].…”

“…Nine articles [133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141] explored the applications of digital technologies in the strategy of COVID-19 vaccination. Machine learning algorithms were mainly applied to this field to help governments formulate better vaccination strategies in different scenarios.…”