COVID-19 County Level Severity Classification with Imbalanced Dataset: A NearMiss Under-sampling Approach

COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in the late 2019 has spread across the globe. The disease has infected millions of people. Thousands of lives have been lost. The momentum of the disease has been slowed by the introduction of vaccine; however, some countries are still recording high number of casualties. The focus of this work is to design, develop and evaluate a machine learning county level COVID-19 severity classifier. The proposed model will predict severity of the pandemic in a county into low, moderate, or high. Policy makers will find the work useful in the distribution of vaccines. Four learning algorithms (two ensembles and two non-ensembles) were trained and evaluated. Class imbalance was addressed using NearMiss under-sampling of the majority classes. The result of our experiment shows that the ensemble models outperformed the non-ensemble models by a considerable margin.