Multi-class classification of COVID-19 documents using machine learning algorithms

In most biomedical research paper corpus, document classification is a crucial task. Even due to the global epidemic, it is a crucial task for researchers across a variety of fields to figure out the relevant scientific research papers accurately and quickly from a flood of biomedical research papers. It can also assist learners or researchers in assigning a research paper to an appropriate category and also help to find the relevant research paper within a very short time. A biomedical document classifier needs to be designed differently to go beyond a “general” text classifier because it’s not dependent only on the text itself (i.e. on titles and abstracts) but can also utilize other information like entities extracted using some medical taxonomies or bibliometric data. The main objective of this research was to find out the type of information or features and representation method creates influence the biomedical document classification task. For this reason, we run several experiments on conventional text classification methods with different kinds of features extracted from the titles, abstracts, and bibliometric data. These procedures include data cleaning, feature engineering, and multi-class classification. Eleven different variants of input data tables were created and analyzed using ten machine learning algorithms. We also evaluate the data efficiency and interpretability of these models as essential features of any biomedical research paper classification system for handling specifically the COVID-19 related health crisis. Our major findings are that TF-IDF representations outperform the entity extraction methods and the abstract itself provides sufficient information for correct classification. Out of the used machine learning algorithms, the best performance over various forms of document representation was achieved by Random Forest and Neural Network (BERT). Our results lead to a concrete guideline for practitioners on biomedical document classification.