IoT-cloud based healthcare model for COVID-19 detection: an enhanced k-Nearest Neighbour classifier based approach

COVID – 19 affected severely worldwide. The pandemic has caused many causalities in a very short span. The IoT-cloud-based healthcare model requirement is utmost in this situation to provide a better decision in the covid-19 pandemic. In this paper, an attempt has been made to perform predictive analytics regarding the disease using a machine learning classifier. This research proposed an enhanced KNN (k NearestNeighbor) algorithm eKNN, which did not randomly choose the value of k. However, it used a mathematical function of the dataset’s sample size while determining the k value. The enhanced KNN algorithm eKNN has experimented on 7 benchmark COVID-19 datasets of different size, which has been gathered from standard data cloud of different countries (Brazil, Mexico, etc.). It appeared that the enhanced KNN classifier performs significantly better than ordinary KNN. The second research question augmented the enhanced KNN algorithm with feature selection using ACO (Ant Colony Optimization). Results indicated that the enhanced KNN classifier along with the feature selection mechanism performed way better than enhanced KNN without feature selection. This paper involves proposing an improved KNN attempting to find an optimal value of k and studying IoT-cloud-based COVID – 19 detection.