Assessment of COVID-19-Related Genes Through Associative Classification Techniques

Abstract

Objective: This study aims to classify COVID-19 by applying the associative classification method on the gene data set consisting of open access COVID-19 negative and positive patients and revealing the disease relationship with these genes by identifying the genes that cause COVID-19. Methods: In the study, an associative classification model was applied to the gene data set of patients with and without open access COVID-19. In this open-access data set used, 15979 genes are belonging to 234 individuals. Out of 234 people, 141 (60.3%) were COVID-19 negative and 93 (39.7%) were COVID-19 positives. In this study, LASSO, one of the feature selection methods, was performed to choose the relevant predictors. The models' performance was evaluated with accuracy, balanced accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and F1-score. Results: According to the study findings, the performance metrics from the associative classification model were accuracy of 92.70%, balanced accuracy of 91.80%, the sensitivity of 87.10%, the specificity of 96.50%, the positive predictive value of 94.20%, the negative predictive value of 91.90%, and F1-score of 90.50%. Conclusions: The proposed associative classification model achieved very high performances in classifying COVID-19. The extracted association rules related to the genes can help diagnose and treat the disease.