Bio-marker identification for COVID-19 remains a vital research area to improve current and future pandemic responses. Innovative artificial intelligence and machine learning-based systems may leverage the large quantity and complexity of single cell sequencing data to quickly identify disease with high sensitivity. In this study, we developed a novel approach to classify patient COVID-19 infection severity using single-cell sequencing data derived from patient BronchoAlveolar Lavage Fluid (BALF) samples. We also identified key genetic biomarkers associated with COVID-19 infection severity. Feature importance scores from high performing COVID-19 classifiers were used to identify a set of novel genetic biomarkers that are predictive of COVID-19 infection severity. Treatment development and pandemic reaction may be greatly improved using our novel big-data approach. Our implementation is available on https://github.com/aekanshgoel/COVID-19_scRNAseq.
The dataset contains a gene expression matrix of 23,189 cells and 1,999 genes. Each cell has a COVID severity label (Normal, Mild, or Severe) based on the clinical severity label of its patient of origin.
