Time Series Analysis of COVID-19 Confirmed Cases in Select Countries

Abstract

The world is dealing with unprecedented times with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging one nation after another. Most of the nations which witnessed the pandemic earlier are on the path of recovery, while the pandemic is discovering new grounds in Africa, South America and Asia. This work proposes a framework to compare the outbreak, spread and decline of the pandemic in countries like Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, which were strongly affected but have largely recovered and are in the process of unlocking restrictions; we consider them as case studies. Correlation analysis has been used to determine the association between COVID-19 cases and time series of new COVID-19 cases in countries under study. Dynamic time warping (DTW) is used to measure the similarity between time series of new COVID-19 cases in the countries under study with different shapes and growth rates. We observed that there was a strong correlation between the time series of new COVID-19 cases in the countries under observation. The time series of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom were found to be the most similar. The strong correlation between the time series of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and China with that of India shows that the case study of these countries could be used to understand the propagation of the trajectory of COVID-19 cases in countries where the outbreak is in the preliminary stages.