Forecasting of COVID-19 Cases Under Different Precaution Strategies in Turkey

Abstract

The coronavirus disease started at the end of 2019 and affected all the countries in the world. In Turkey, the vaccination process started at the beginning of 2021 but performed in slow progress. Thus, the Turkish Government tried to implement precautions to control this virus's spread. In this study, we evaluated and compared five different forecasting models, ARIMA, Prophet, NARNN, Stacked LSTM, and Bidirectional LSTM, in order to show the effect of these precaution strategies on virus spread using a real-world data set. According to the test results, ARIMA and Prophet were found to be the most accurate models for small data sets that are split regarding precautions. Moreover, test results showed that when data size grows, LSTM model performance increases. However, these models' performance decreased when we fed these models by using the entire data set without splitting.