Curating, Collecting, and Cataloguing Global COVID-19 Datasets for the Aim of Predicting Personalized Risk

Abstract

Although hundreds of datasets have been published since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there is a lack of centralized resources where these datasets are listed and harmonized to facilitate their applicability and uptake by predictive modeling approaches. Firstly, such a centralized resource provides information about data owners to researchers who are searching datasets to develop their predictive models. Secondly, the harmonization of the datasets supports simultaneously taking advantage of several similar datasets. This, in turn, does not only ease the imperative external validation of data-driven models but can also be used for virtual cohort generation, which helps to overcome data sharing impediments. Here, we present that the COVID-19 data catalogue is a repository that provides a landscape view of COVID-19 studies and datasets as a putative source to enable researchers to develop personalized COVID-19 predictive risk models. The COVID-19 data catalogue currently contains over 400 studies and their relevant information collected from a wide range of global sources such as global initiatives, clinical trial repositories, publications, and data repositories. Further, the curated content stored in this data catalogue is complemented by a web application, providing visualizations of these studies, including their references, relevant information such as measured variables, and the geographical locations of where these studies were performed. This resource is one of the first to capture, organize, and store studies, datasets, and metadata related to COVID-19 in a comprehensive repository. We believe that our work will facilitate future research and development of personalized predictive risk models for COVID-19.