Predicting the Number of COVID-19 Sufferers in Malang City Using the Backpropagation Neural Network with the Fletcher–Reeves Method

Abstract

COVID-19 is a type of an infectious disease that is caused by the new coronavirus. The spread of COVID-19 needs to be suppressed because COVID-19 can cause death, especially for sufferers with congenital diseases and a weak immune system. COVID-19 spreads through direct contact, wherein the infected individual spreads the COVID-19 virus through cough, sneeze, or close contacts. Predicting the number of COVID-19 sufferers becomes an important task in the effort to curb the spread of COVID-19. Artificial neural network (ANN) is the prediction method that delivers effective results in doing this job. Backpropagation, a type of ANN algorithm, offers predictive problem solving with good performance. However, its performance depends on the optimization method applied during the training process. In general, the optimization method in ANN is the gradient descent method, which is known to have a slow convergence rate. Meanwhile, the Fletcher–Reeves method has a faster convergence rate than the gradient descent method. Based on this hypothesis, this paper proposes a prediction model for the number of COVID-19 sufferers in Malang using the Backpropagation neural network with the Fletcher–Reeves method. The experimental results show that the Backpropagation neural network with the Fletcher–Reeves method has a better performance than the Backpropagation neural network with the gradient descent method. This is shown by the Means Square Error (MSE) resulting from the proposed method which is smaller than the MSE resulting from the Backpropagation neural network with the gradient descent method.