A SURVEY ON MACHINE LEARNING APPLICATIONS TO TACKLE COVID-19 VIRAL PANDEMIC

An infectious viral disease COVID-19 was declared as global pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020.Every day the number of infected patients gets increasing in all over the world, at an alarming rate. This created a global urgency to find a power tool and methodologies to fight against the crisis. In this survey, the main scope and contributions of machine learning (ML) applications are discussed in aspects of forecasting the spread, identifying the infectant, diagnosing the patient, investigating the existing drugs and developing the specific vaccine. Artificial intelligence with ML is already supporting genomics, medical image examination, and prediction and thus machine learning still has great potential to tackle the pandemic. This survey discusses challenges in the machine learning algorithms with the goal of promoting the research to fight the COVID-19 viral pandemic and to prepare better for future pandemics.