COVID-19 Disease Classification by Cough Records Analysis using Machine Learning

The rapid spreading rate of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in more than 6.2 million deceased cases. Furthermore, the patients of the latest Omicron variation carry light to almost no symptoms of the disease themselves. Thus, the requirement for a new diagnosis method besides Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) becomes the most important step to successfully detect infected cases. In this research, the application of the KNN, Ensemble and SincNet models are implemented as the main models for classification diagnosis based on cough sound records of infected patients. After pre-processing steps for removing silence ranges in the audio scripts, the cough sounds are augmented, subsequently separated into single cough samples, then generated 3 testing scenarios for dealing with the imbalanced problem between the sample classes. Afterward, MelFrequency information and MelSprectrogram are extracted as main features for analysis in order to distinguish patients with COVID-19 disease and healthy cases. The AICV115M dataset consisting of two classes COVID-19 and NonCOVID-19 is implemented for performance evaluation. The recorded highest accuracy on the models KNN, Ensemble and SincNet are 92.49%, 90.1% and 85.15%, respectively.