**1. Introduction**

The COVID-19 was triggered by Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus, which was initially identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019 [1,2]. This disease spread in the whole world rapidly and has significantly affected many aspects of life including mental health, social life, supply chain, energy consumption, education, etc., [3,4]. Lockdown measures were taken by governments all over the world to impede the disperse of the disease. People all over the world were restricted to quarantine and keep social distancing to determine the number of people who have become infected [5]. Studies have shown that the lockdown during this COVID-19 had different physiological effects including anxiety, stress, confusion [6], and anger [7]. Similar effects were observed in the education domain and various educational stakeholders were affected by lockdown in COVID-19. According to a

**Citation:** Saeed, A.; Zaffar, M.; Abbas, M.A.; Quraishi, K.S.; Shahrose, A.; Irfan, M.; Huneif, M.A.; Abdulwahab, A.; Alduraibi, S.K.; Alshehri, F.; et al. A Turf-Based Feature Selection Technique for Predicting Factors Affecting Human Health during Pandemic. *Life* **2022**, *12*, 1367. https://doi.org/10.3390/ life12091367

Academic Editor: Tao Huang

Received: 18 July 2022 Accepted: 24 August 2022 Published: 1 September 2022

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report of UNSECO [8], about 1.6 billion students faced school closure issues. Face-to-face education was replaced by e-learning. This transformed the lives of the students reducing them to their homes. Students' mental and physical health is affected by the COVID-19 lockout situation. Different studies are taking part to figure out the reasons causing the disturbance in the students' mental health. During COVID-19, a variety of statistical tools were used to investigate the elements that influence the students' mental health. The results of different existing studies reported that lockdown causes depression, anxiety, mental stress and health issues in quarantined populations during COVID-19 [9]. Furthermore, social distancing and different lockdown measures during COVID-19 negatively affect the health of student [10]. The efficient execution of education depends on the health of students. As the students are the main pillar of society and the nation's leadership and control will rely on them in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to put maximum possible effort to maintain the health of students [11].

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a vital role in predicting coronavirus effects in the future by analyzing the covid data [12]. Different Al-based supervised and unsupervised algorithms are being employed in studies for COVID-19 predictions and analysis [13]. As the education sector is the base of every country's development, so AI techniques help the educational stakeholders and government officials of countries all over the world to plan strategies and techniques to maintain the health of students. The focus of this study is to employ the AI-based technique for the identification of factors affecting the students' mental health in the pandemic of COVID-19. The following are the primary contributions of the proposed work:


In this study, COVID-19 related student data will be evaluated in order to determine factors affecting students' health during COVID-19 lockdown. The paper is structured in the subsequent pattern: a summary of related literature is provided in Section 2; the suggested AI-based strategy is described in detail in Section 3; Section 4 presents the analysis evaluation of the proposed technique; and the research and future work is summarized in Section 5.
