Improved machine learning performances with transfer learning to predicting need for hospitalization in arboviral infections against the small dataset

The prediction of hospital patients and outpatients with suspected arboviral infection individuals in research-limited settings of the urban areas is defined as a challenging process for clinicians. Dengue, Chikungunya, and Zika arboviruses have gained attention in recent years because of the high prevalence in the society and financial burden of major global health systems. In this study, we proposed a machine learning algorithm based prediction model over retrospective medical records, which are named as SISA (the Severity Index for Suspected Arbovirus) and SISAL (the Severity Index for Suspected Arbovirus with Laboratory) datasets. Therefore, we aim to inform the clinicians about the use of machine learning with transfer learning success for diagnosis and comprehensive comparison of the classification performances over the SISA/SISAL datasets in the resource-limited settings that may cause to the small datasets of arboviral infection. In this study, Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory have achieved 100% accuracy and 1 of area under the curve (AUC) score, Fully Connected Deep Network has provided 92.86% accuracy and 0.969 AUC score in the SISAL dataset with transfer learning. Moreover, 98.73% accuracy and 0.988 AUC score were obtained by Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory for the SISA dataset. Furthermore, Linear Discriminant Analysis (shallow algorithm) has provided reaching up to 96.43% accuracy. Notably, deep learning based models have achieved improved performances compared to the previously reported study.