Applying Machine Learning Sampling Techniques to Address Data Imbalance in a Chilean COVID-19 Symptoms and Comorbidities Dataset

<jats:p>Reliably detecting COVID-19 is critical for diagnosis and disease control. However, imbalanced data in medical datasets pose significant challenges for machine learning models, leading to bias and poor generalization. The dataset obtained from the EPIVIGILA system and the Chilean Epidemiological Surveillance Process contains information on over 6,000,000 patients, but, like many current datasets, it suffers from class imbalance. To address this issue, we applied various machine learning algorithms, both with and without sampling methods, and compared them using different classification and diagnostic metrics such as precision, sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratio positive, and diagnostic odds ratio. Our results showed that applying sampling methods to this dataset improved the metric values and contributed to models with better generalization. Effectively managing imbalanced data is crucial for reliable COVID-19 diagnosis. This study enhances the understanding of how machine learning techniques can improve diagnostic reliability and contribute to better patient outcomes.</jats:p>