Predictive Analysis Based on Prophet Model: Evidence from the Number of Epidemic Infections

Abstract

This study makes a prediction of infection numbers in the future and investigates the correlation between the new cases and the stock price of companies in three different fields. In the first part of the prediction, we use three methods to make predictions of the future infected number, including the ETS, Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARIMA), and Prophet model. In the next part, we use the GARCH model to discuss the correlation between infection numbers and stock prices. Considering the heterogeneity, we choose three different companies’ stocks to represent three industries respectively. They are Apple, Amazon and Pfizer. The result indicates that the stock price of Apple is negatively correlated to the infection number, the relationship between the infection number and the price of Amazon is inconspicuous, while the price of Pfizer is positively correlated with the development of the pandemic. Thus, we draw the conclusion that the impact of the epidemic is strong to manufacturing, is not obvious to the Internet industry, and boosts the development of the medical corporation.