An Autoregressive Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Hybrid Neural Network for Accurate Prediction of COVID-19 Cases

Abstract

Efficient prediction of COVID-19 cases could prepare the healthcare system to accommodate the COVID-19 cases in the forthcoming days and improve the overall resource management. A hybrid model comprised of an autoregressive filter, a graph convolutional neural network (GCN), and a long short-term memory neural network is proposed for COVID-19 cases prediction in USA. It captures accurately both linearities and nonlinearities present in the time series. An adjacency matrix is exploited in GCN that relies on Granger causality tests applied to historical COVID-19 cases for each state in USA. By doing so, the latent information about the spread of the virus is captured efficiently and the prediction performance of the hybrid model is improved, revealing which state truly affects the other ones. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques.