Detecting COVID-19 Utilizing Probabilistic Graphical Models

Abstract

Probabilistic graphical models are employed in a variety of areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to depict causal relations among sets of random variables. In this research, we employ probabilistic graphical models in the form of Bayesian network to detect coronavirus disease 2019 (denoted as COVID-19) disease. We propose two efficient Bayesian network models that are potent in encoding causal relations among random variable, i.e., COVID-19 symptoms. The first Bayesian network model, denoted as BN1, is built depending on the acquired knowledge from medical experts. We collect data from clinics and hospitals in Saudi Arabia for our research. We name this authentic dataset DScovid. The second Bayesian network model, denoted as BN2, is learned from the real dataset DScovid depending on Chow-Liu tree approach. We also implement our proposed Bayesian network models and present our experimental results. Our results show that the proposed approaches are capable of modeling the issue of making decisions in the context of COVID-19. Moreover, our experimental results show that the two Bayesian network models we propose in this work are effective for not only extracting casual relations but also reducing uncertainty and increasing the effectiveness of causal reasoning and prediction.