Forecasting COVID -19 Spread in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore

Abstract

Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia have reported a considerable amount of infected cases compared with other Southeast Asian countries and still reporting the infected cases. These countries located geographically as a belt. They are preparing to reopen and confirm the sleek function as usual but in doubts about the future behavior of the pandemic. Hence the study aimed to forecast the number of infected cases of COVID -19 in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. The daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 of Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore for the period of 22nd January 2020 to 29th June 2020 were obtained from the World Health Organization (WHO) database. Time series plots and Auto Correlation Functions (ACF) were used to examine the pattern of the series. The linear trend model and Double Exponential Smoothing (DES) techniques were tested to forecast the pandemic. The Anderson Darling test, ACF, and Ljung-Box Q (LBQ)-test were used to test the validation criterion and fit the model. The forecasting ability of the models was assessed by two measurements of errors; Route Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) in both model fitting and verification process. It is concluded that the linear trend model is suitable to forecast the pandemic of Malaysia and DES has successfully fitted for all three countries.