Modeling and Forecasting the COVID-19 Temporal Spread in Greece: An Exploratory Approach based on Complex Network Defined Splines.

Konstantinos Demertzis,Dimitrios Tsiotas,Lykourgos Magafas

doi:10.3390/ijerph17134693

Abstract

Within the complex framework of anti-COVID-19 health management, where the criteria of diagnostic testing, the availability of public-health resources and services, and the applied anti-COVID-19 policies vary between countries, the reliability and accuracy in the modeling of temporal spread can prove to be effective in the worldwide fight against the disease. This paper applies an exploratory time-series analysis to the evolution of the disease in Greece, which currently suggests a success story of COVID-19 management. The proposed method builds on a recent conceptualization of detecting connective communities in a time-series and develops a novel spline regression model where the knot vector is determined by the community detection in the complex network. Overall, the study contributes to the COVID-19 research by proposing a free of disconnected past-data and reliable framework of forecasting, which can facilitate decision-making and management of the available health resources.

Highlights

The coronavirus disease 2019, abbreviated as COVID-19, is a contagious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which frequently causes fever, cough, and dyspnea, and, less frequently, muscle pains and neck-related problems [1,2,3]
As can be square error (RMSE), and 0.25–34.19% for the relative absolute error (RAE). These improvements are considerable even in the cases of R and R2, given the already good fitting performance of the cubic and randomly calibrated spline models. It provides the area under the ROC curve metric (AUC) in order to assess the model performance [43]
Accurate forecasting is a major task in epidemiology that becomes very important today in the global emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic

Summary

Introduction

The coronavirus disease 2019, abbreviated as COVID-19, is a contagious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which frequently causes fever, cough, and dyspnea, and, less frequently, muscle pains and neck-related problems [1,2,3]. The virus is mainly transmitted to humans through respiratory channels, and the majority of patients are asymptomatic or have soft symptoms to the disease, but in certain cases develop either pneumonia (the worst aspect of which is the fatal acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)) or multi-organ deficiency [3]. The COVID-19 is detected either by laboratory methods, usually by the method of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [9], where the sample is received from the rhino-laryngology region, or just by the clinical methods of evaluating the combinations of symptoms (at least of two major symptoms), danger-factors, and indications of the chest radiogram, in conjunction with the history of the patients’

Methods

Results

Conclusion