A brief review and scientometric analysis on ensemble learning methods for handling COVID-19

Abstract

Numerous efforts and research have been conducted worldwide to combat the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In this regard, some researchers have focused on deep and machine-learning approaches to discover more about this disease. There have been many articles on using ensemble learning methods for COVID-19 detection. Still, there seems to be no scientometric analysis or a brief review of these researches. Hence, a combined method of scientometric analysis and brief review was used to study the published articles that employed an ensemble learning approach to detect COVID-19. This research used both methods to overcome their limitations, leading to enhanced and reliable outcomes. The related articles were retrieved from the Scopus database. Then a two-step procedure was employed. A concise review of the collected articles was conducted. Then they underwent scientometric and bibliometric analyses. The findings revealed that convolutional neural network (CNN) is the mostly employed algorithm, while support vector machine (SVM), random forest, Resnet, DenseNet, and visual geometry group (VGG) were also frequently used. Additionally, China has had a significant presence in the numerous top-ranking categories of this field of research. Both study phases yielded valuable results and rankings.

Keywords: COVID-19; Convolutional neural network; Deep learning; Ensemble learning; Ensemble method.

Fig. 1

Top influential countries in this field of research.

Fig. 2

Number of published articles by each of the studied publishers.

Fig. 3

Number of documents per journal.

Fig. 4

Top funding entities in this field of research.

Fig. 5

Number of documents based on affiliation of the published research.

Fig. 6

Top five influential authors in this research field.

Fig. 7

Co-authorship map for the top five influential authors.

Fig. 8

Word occurrence in abstracts.

Fig. 9

Top 10 used methods/algorithms.