A process mining- deep learning approach to predict survival in a cohort of hospitalized COVID‐19 patients

Background: Various machine learning and artificial intelligence methods have been used to predict outcomes of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. However, process mining has not yet been used for COVID-19 prediction. We developed a process mining/deep learning approach to predict mortality among COVID-19 patients and updated the prediction in 6-h intervals during the first 72 h after hospital admission. Methods: The process mining/deep learning model produced temporal information related to the variables and incorporated demographic and clinical data to predict mortality. The mortality prediction was updated in 6-h intervals during the first 72 h after hospital admission. Moreover, the performance of the model was compared with published and self-developed traditional machine learning models that did not use time as a variable. The performance was compared using the Area Under the Receiver Operator Curve (AUROC), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Results: The proposed process mining/deep learning model outperformed the comparison models in almost all time intervals with a robust AUROC above 80% on a dataset that was imbalanced. Conclusions: Our proposed process mining/deep learning model performed significantly better than commonly used machine learning approaches that ignore time information. Thus, time information should be incorporated in models to predict outcomes more accurately.