Intelligent Forecasting Strategy for COVID-19 Pandemic Trend in India: A Statistical Approach

Abstract

AbstractIn recent times, an infectious disease namely COVID-19 has affected a large number of individuals. Forecasting models have been helpful in predicting the possible number of confirmed cases, deaths, and recovery counts in the future. In this paper, the prediction of COVID-19 cumulative confirmed cases and deaths for India is analyzed based on various statistical models such as (a) time series, (b) machine learning, and (c) ensemble learning. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and Holt-Winters exponential smoothing in time series; support vector regression (SVR) and linear regression (LR) in machine learning (ML) and random forest regression in ensemble learning (EL) have been implemented for predictions. The accuracies of the trained models are evaluated using metrics such as R-squared value, root mean squared error (RMSE), mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute errors (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The proposed forecasting models can be used to monitor the rise in COVID-19 cases which can thereby be helpful for government officials to make required changes to their system.KeywordsCOVID-19 pandemic predictionTime-series forecastingEnsemble learningMachine learningSupport vector regression