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A compositional approach to the analysis of white blood cell counts for early COVID-19 detection

Zhang, Z.; Graffelman, J.; Dorn, M.

2025-05-29 public and global health
10.1101/2025.05.27.25328204 medRxiv
Show abstract

The investigation of using complete blood-count (CBC) data for COVID-19 infection diagnosis has been a topic of interest in the last couple of years. It could be used as an affordable complementary tool to RT-qPCR and is particularly useful for developing areas struggling to test their population for suffering from massive COVID-19 infection. However, previous research on using CBC data for COVID-19 infection classification didnt appreciate the compositional nature of white blood cell counts data. In this paper, we treat white blood cell counts data as compositional variables and apply compositional data visualization methods, using biplots based on log-ratio principal component analysis. Also, we apply compositional classification models to detect COVID-19 infection, using log-ratio linear discriminant analysis. We successfully illustrate the efficacy of compositional methods by building a compositional classification model superior to traditional models and highlight the benefits of analyzing CBC data from a compositional perspective. In a database of symptomatic individuals, we achieve a classification rate of 85% for the PCR-test result using the main CBC composition with some additional blood characteristics.

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