Background and objectives The pandemic of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has severely impacted human society with a massive death toll worldwide. There is an urgent need for early and reliable screening of COVID-19 patients to provide better and timely patient care and to combat the spread of the disease. In this context, recent studies have reported some key advantages of using routine blood tests for initial screening of COVID-19 patients. In this article, first we present a review of the emerging techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis using routine laboratory and/or clinical data. Then, we propose ERLX which is an ensemble learning model for COVID-19 diagnosis from routine blood tests. Method The proposed model uses three well-known diverse classifiers, extra trees, random forest and logistic regression, which have different architectures and learning characteristics at the first level, and then combines their predictions by using a second level extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier to achieve a better performance. For data preparation, the proposed methodology employs a KNNImputer algorithm to handle null values in the dataset, isolation forest (iForest) to remove outlier data, and a synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) to balance data distribution. For model interpretability, features importance are reported by using the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) technique. Results The proposed model was trained and evaluated by using a publicly available data set from Albert Einstein Hospital in Brazil, which consisted of 5,644 data samples with 559 confirmed COVID-19 cases. The ensemble model achieved outstanding performance with an overall accuracy of 99.88% [95% CI: 99.6 - 100], AUC of 99.38% [95% CI: 97.5 - 100], a sensitivity of 98.72% [95% CI: 94.6 - 100] and a specificity of 99.99% [95% CI: 99.99- 100]. Discussion The proposed model revealed better performance when compared against existing state-of-the-art studies [ 3 , 22 , 56 , 71 ] for the same set of features employed by them. As compared to the best performing Bayes Net model [ 22 ] average accuracy of 95.159%, ERLX achieved an average accuracy of 99.94%. In comparison with AUC of 85% reported by the SVM model [ 56 ], ERLX obtained AUC of 99.77% in addition to improvements in sensitivity, and specificity. As compared with ER-COV model [ 71 ] average sensitivity of 70.25% and specificity of 85.98%, ERLX model achieved sensitivity of 99.47% and specificity of 99.99%. The ERLX model obtained considerable higher score as compared with ANN model [ 3 ] in all performance metrics. Therefore, the model presented is robust and can be deployed for reliable early and rapid screening of COVID-19 patients.

Background: Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disorder associated with genetic and neurological components leading to difficulties in social interaction and communication. According to statistics of WHO, the number of patients diagnosed with ASD is gradually increasing. Most of the current studies focus on clinical diagnosis, data collection and brain images analysis, but do not focus on the diagnosis of ASD based on machine learning. Objective: This study aims to classify ASD data to provide a quick, accessible and easy way to support early diagnosis of ASD. Methods: Three ASD datasets are used for children, adolescences and adults. To classify the ASD data, we used the k-Nearest Neighbours method (kNN), the Support Vector Machine method (SVM) and the Random Forests method (RF). In our experiments, the data was randomly split into training and test sets. The parts of the data were randomly selected 100 times to test the classification methods. Results: The final results were assessed by the average values. It is shown that SVM and RF are effective methods for ASD classification. In particular, the RF method classified the data with an accuracy of 100% for all above datasets. Conclusion: The early diagnosis of ASD is critical. If the number of data samples is large enough, we can achieve a high accuracy for machine learning-based ASD diagnosis. Among three classification methods, RF achieves the best performance for ASD data classification.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic has threatened the lives of people worldwide and posed considerable challenges. Early and accurate screening of infected people is vital for combating the disease. To help with the limited quantity of swab tests, we propose a machine learning prediction model to accurately diagnose COVID-19 from clinical and/or routine laboratory data. The model exploits a new ensemble-based method called the deep forest (DF), where multiple classifiers in multiple layers are used to encourage diversity and improve performance. The cascade level employs the layer-by-layer processing and is constructed from three different classifiers: extra trees, XGBoost, and LightGBM. The prediction model was trained and evaluated on two publicly available datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed DF model has an accuracy of 99.5%, sensitivity of 95.28%, and specificity of 99.96%. These performance metrics are comparable to other well-established machine learning techniques, and hence DF model can serve as a fast screening tool for COVID-19 patients at places where testing is scarce.

In Parkinson's disease (PD), on-demand deep brain stimulation is required so that stimulation is regulated to reduce side effects resulting from continuous stimulation and PD exacerbation due to untimely stimulation. Also, the progressive nature of PD necessitates the use of dynamic detection schemes that can track the nonlinearities in PD. This paper proposes the use of dynamic feature extraction and dynamic pattern classification to achieve dynamic PD detection taking into account the demand for high accuracy, low computation, and real-time detection. The dynamic feature extraction and dynamic pattern classification are selected by evaluating a subset of feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and classification algorithms that have been used in brain-machine interfaces. A novel dimensionality reduction technique, the maximum ratio method (MRM) is proposed, which provides the most efficient performance. In terms of accuracy and complexity for hardware implementation, a combination having discrete wavelet transform for feature extraction, MRM for dimensionality reduction, and dynamic k-nearest neighbor for classification was chosen as the most efficient. It achieves a classification accuracy of 99.29%, an F1-score of 97.90%, and a choice probability of 99.86%.

The mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease (PD) remain poorly understood and are still under debate. This has hindered the development of adaptive DBS (aDBS). For further progress in aDBS, more insight into the dynamics of PD is needed, which can be obtained using machine learning models. This study presents an approach that uses generative and discriminative machine learning models to more accurately estimate the symptom severity of patients and adjust therapy accordingly. A support vector machine is used as the representative algorithm for discriminative machine learning models, and the Gaussian mixture model is used for the generative models. Therapy is effected using the state estimates obtained from the machine learning models together with a fuzzy controller in a critic-actor control approach. Both machine learning model configurations achieve PD suppression to desired state in 7 out of 9 cases; most of which settle in under 2 s.