Forecasting Of COVID-19 Research Articles

Short-term Covid-19 forecast for latecomers

The number of new Covid-19 cases is still high in several countries, despite vaccination efforts. A number of countries are experiencing new and severe waves of infection. Therefore, the availability of reliable forecasts for the number of cases and deaths in the coming days is of fundamental importance. We propose a simple statistical method for short-term real-time forecasting of the number of Covid-19 cases and fatalities in countries that are latecomers—i.e., countries where cases of the disease started to appear some time after others. In particular, we propose a penalized LASSO regression model with an error correction mechanism to construct a model of a latecomer country in terms of other countries that were at a similar stage of the pandemic some days before. By tracking the number of cases in those countries, we use an adaptive rolling-window scheme to forecast the number of cases and deaths in the latecomer. We apply this methodology to 45 countries and we provide detailed results for four of them: Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Portugal. We show that the methodology performs very well when compared to alternative methods. These forecasts aim to foster better short-run management of the healthcare system and can be applied not only to countries but also to different regions within a country. Finally, the modeling framework derived in the paper can be applied to other infectious diseases.

Mathematical Modeling and Forecasting of COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia under Fractal-Fractional Derivative in Caputo Sense with Power-Law

This manuscript is devoted to investigating a fractional-order mathematical model of COVID-19. The corresponding derivative is taken in Caputo sense with power-law of fractional order μ and fractal dimension χ. We give some detailed analysis on the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the proposed problem. Furthermore, some results regarding basic reproduction number and stability are given. For the proposed theoretical analysis, we use fixed point theory while for numerical analysis fractional Adams–Bashforth iterative techniques are utilized. Using our numerical scheme is verified by using some real values of the parameters to plot the approximate solution to the considered model. Graphical presentations corresponding to different values of fractional order and fractal dimensions are given. Moreover, we provide some information regarding the real data of Saudi Arabia from 1 March 2020 till 22 April 2021, then calculated the fatality rates by utilizing the SPSS, Eviews and Expert Modeler procedure. We also built forecasts of infection for the period 23 April 2021 to 30 May 2021, with 95% confidence.

Improved Linear Factor based Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm with Ensemble Learning for Covid-19 Forecasting

Recently the COVID’19 is extensively increasing around the world with many challenges for researchers. Rigorous respiratory disease corona virus 2 show aggression to many parts of COVID’19 affected patients, together with brain and lungs. The changeableness of Corona virus with likely to infect Central Nervous System emphasize the necessity for technological development to identify, handle, and take care of brain damages in COVID’19 patients. An exact short-term predicting the quantity of newly infected and cured cases is vital for resource optimization to stop or reduce the growth of infection. The previous system designed a Linear Decreasing Inertia Weight based Cat Swarm Optimization with Half Binomial Distribution based Convolutional Neural Network (LDIWCSO-HBDCNN) approach for COVID-19 forecasting. However, the ensemble learning is required to improve the prediction outcome via integrating many approaches. This approach allows the production of better predictive performance compared to a single model. For solving this problem, the proposed system designed an Improved Linear Factor based Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm with Ensemble Learning (ILFGOA with EL) for covid-19 forecasting. Initially, the COVID-19 forecasting dataset is taken as an input. With the help of min-max approach, data normalization is done. Then the optimal features are selected by using Improved Linear Factor based Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (ILFGOA) algorithm to improve the prediction accuracy. Based on the selected features, Ensemble Learning (EL) which includes Hyperparameter based Convolutional Neural Network (HCNN) is utilized to identify infected and demise cases across india for a period of time. The outcome of analysis shows that the introduced method attains better execution against previous system with regard to error rate, accuracy, precision, recall and f-measure.

A pre-registered short-term forecasting study of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland during the second wave

Disease modelling has had considerable policy impact during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and it is increasingly acknowledged that combining multiple models can improve the reliability of outputs. Here we report insights from ten weeks of collaborative short-term forecasting of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland (12 October–19 December 2020). The study period covers the onset of the second wave in both countries, with tightening non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and subsequently a decay (Poland) or plateau and renewed increase (Germany) in reported cases. Thirteen independent teams provided probabilistic real-time forecasts of COVID-19 cases and deaths. These were reported for lead times of one to four weeks, with evaluation focused on one- and two-week horizons, which are less affected by changing NPIs. Heterogeneity between forecasts was considerable both in terms of point predictions and forecast spread. Ensemble forecasts showed good relative performance, in particular in terms of coverage, but did not clearly dominate single-model predictions. The study was preregistered and will be followed up in future phases of the pandemic.

Weather and population based forecasting of novel COVID-19 using deep learning approaches

The spread of novel corona virus across the globe has a significant impact on various stake holders and posting a major challenge to the research community. Government has taken several measures for maintaining social distance and containment of disease, but still it is not a sufficient for the developing countries like India where the level of understanding the issue is deprived and hence it is a major challenge to the Health Care professionals. Therefore, it is mandatory that a prediction of the number of possible cases enables the preparedness of the Government and the Hospitals in resolving the issues and to take measures in controlling the spread of the disease Series. Deep learning model has been built by considering the features of weather and COVID-19 data (recovered, infected and deceased) for predicting the number of cases expected in India. The model is built on Concurrent Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Bidirectional RNN (BRNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (BLSTM) based on the daily weather and COVID-19 data collected from Indian subcontinent. The results revealed that the algorithm BRNN yields a better prediction model when compared with the other models.

A Missing Data on Covid-19 Forecasts

Mathematical and computational studies of Covid-19 have underestimated the influence that other countries have on their daily records. To visualize this, a Granger causality analysis was implemented in Python to determine if the cases registered in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and the USA have any effect on Venezuela, and between all of them. Finally, this paper highlights the need to incorporate causality analysis employing only the cases of Covid-19 to improve mid and long term forecasts.

Disease Forecasting and Severity Prediction Model for COVID-19 Using Correlated Feature Extraction and Feed-Forward Artificial Neural Networks

The digitization of the medical sector has led to an explosion of heterogeneous medical records. The contribution of big data in the medical field is used to effectively address certain unsolved issues. Effectively integrating and analyzing this big data can reveal many useful hidden medical information. The COVID-19 virus, which first appeared in China at the end of 2019, is suffocating the rest of the world. Traditional methods of preventing this unforeseen pandemic are the lengthy process that can take several years. Now, the second wave of COVID-19 is wreaking havoc throughout the world. The survival rate can be significantly increased by predicting the risk of COVID-19 infection based on the patient's early symptoms and health status. Various disease forecasting approaches based on machine learning, and deep learning has been developed to forecast the severity rate of COVID-19. However, these approaches are becoming useless as the virus mutates. In this proposed research, the prediction model is trained by the proposed Correlated Feature Extraction (CFE) method according to the virus behaviors. Furthermore, two prediction models were established in this study. The first model uses initial symptoms to forecast positive cases. Second, based on the health status of the positive cases, the risk rate is estimated. In this study, the disease is forecast by Feed-Forward Artificial Neural Networks (FFANN). Finally, a comparative study has been conducted with the recently developed COVID-19 disease prediction methods to demonstrate the training efficacy and accuracy of the proposed COVID-19 forecasting system. © 2021 Seventh Sense Research Group®

Multiplicative Holts Winter Model for Trend Analysis and Forecasting of COVID-19 Spread in India.

The surge of the novel COVID-19 caused a tremendous effect on the health and life of the people resulting in more than 4.4 million confirmed cases in 213 countries of the world as of May 14, 2020. In India, the number of cases is constantly increasing since the first case reported on January 30, 2020, resulting in a total of 81,997 cases including 2649 deaths as of May 14, 2020. To assist the government and healthcare sector in preventing the transmission of disease, it is necessary to predict the future confirmed cases. To predict the dynamics of COVID-19 cases, in this paper, we project the forecast of COVID-19 for five most affected states of India such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh using the real-time data. Using Holt–Winters method, a forecast of the number of confirmed cases in these states has been generated. Further, the performance of the method has been determined using RMSE, MSE, MAPE, MAE and compared with other standard algorithms. The analysis shows that the proposed Holt–Winters model generates RMSE value of 76.0, 338.4, 141.5, 425.9, 1991.5 for Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi and Tamil Nadu, which results in more accurate predictions over Holt’s Linear, Auto-regression (AR), Moving Average (MA) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. These estimations may further assist the government in employing strong policies and strategies for enhancing healthcare support all over India.

Empirical Evaluation of Alternative Time-Series Models for COVID-19 Forecasting in Saudi Arabia.

COVID-19 is a disease-causing coronavirus strain that emerged in December 2019 that led to an ongoing global pandemic. The ability to anticipate the pandemic’s path is critical. This is important in order to determine how to combat and track its spread. COVID-19 data is an example of time-series data where several methods can be applied for forecasting. Although various time-series forecasting models are available, it is difficult to draw broad theoretical conclusions regarding their relative merits. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of several time-series models for forecasting COVID-19 cases, recoveries, and deaths in Saudi Arabia. In particular, seven forecasting models were trained using autoregressive integrated moving average, TBATS, exponential smoothing, cubic spline, simple exponential smoothing Holt, and HoltWinters. The models were built using publicly available daily data of COVID-19 during the period of 24 March 2020 to 5 April 2021 reported in Saudi Arabia. The experimental results indicate that the ARIMA model had a smaller prediction error in forecasting confirmed cases, which is consistent with results reported in the literature, while cubic spline showed better predictions for recoveries and deaths. As more data become available, a fluctuation in the forecasting-accuracy metrics was observed, possibly due to abrupt changes in the data.

Analysis and Forecast of the Number of Deaths, Recovered Cases, and Confirmed Cases From COVID-19 for the Top Four Affected Countries Using Kalman Filter

COVID-19 is a virus that spread globally, causing severe health complications and substantial economic impact in various parts of the world. The COVID-19 forecast on infections is significant and crucial information that will help in executing policies and effectively reducing the daily cases. Filtering techniques are important ways to model dynamic structures because they provide good valuations over the recursive Bayesian updates. Kalman filters, one of the filtering techniques, are useful in the studying of contagious infections. Kalman filter algorithm performs an important role in the development of actual and comprehensive approaches to inhibit, learn, react, and reduce spreadable disorder outbreaks in people. The purpose of this paper is to forecast COVID-19 infections using the Kalman filter method. The Kalman filter (KF) was applied for the four most affected countries, namely the United States, India, Brazil, and Russia. Based on the results obtained, the KF method is capable of keeping track of the real COVID-19 data in nearly all scenarios. Kalman filters in the archetype background implement and produce decent COVID-19 predictions. The results of the KF method support the decision-making process for short-term strategies in handling the COVID-19 outbreak.

Epidemiological Forecasting: A Crystal Ball for COVID-19 and Future Pandemics

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, headlines ranging from “Coronavirus forecasts are grim: It’s going to get worse” to “Covid-19 cases and deaths in the US will fall over the next four weeks, forecast predicts” have dominated the news (Achenbach, 2020; Kallingal, 2021). The weekly-published Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 forecasts have become the go-to forecasts for the media, the public, and various levels of government (Cramer et al., 2021). These projections, generated from epidemiological forecasting, not only inform the public’s caution towards the pandemic but are also crucial for officials to create public health guidelines and allocate resources in hospitals (Gibson et al., 2020). But where do these predictions come from?

Hawkes process modeling of COVID-19 with mobility leading indicators and spatial covariates

Hawkes processes are used in statistical modeling for event clustering and causal inference, while they also can be viewed as stochastic versions of popular compartmental models used in epidemiology. Here we show how to develop accurate models of COVID-19 transmission using Hawkes processes with spatial-temporal covariates. We model the conditional intensity of new COVID-19 cases and deaths in the U.S. at the county level, estimating the dynamic reproduction number of the virus within an EM algorithm through a regression on Google mobility indices and demographic covariates in the maximization step. We validate the approach on both short-term and long-term forecasting tasks, showing that the Hawkes process outperforms several models currently used to track the pandemic, including an ensemble approach and an SEIR-variant. We also investigate which covariates and mobility indices are most important for building forecasts of COVID-19 in the U.S.

STL Decomposition and SARIMA Model: The Case for Estimating Value-at-Risk of Covid-19 Increment Rate in DKI Jakarta

In this research, we propose an extreme values measure, the Value-at-Risk (VaR) based Seasonal Trend Loess (STL) Decomposition and Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) models, which is more sensitive to the seasonality of extreme value than the conventional VaR. We consider the problem of the seasonality and extreme value for increment rate of Covid-19 forecasting. For stakeholder, government and regulator, VaR estimation can be implemented to face the extreme wave of new positive Covid-19 in the future and minimize the losses that possibly affected in term of financial and human resources. Specifically, the estimation of VaR is developed with the difference lies on parameter estimators of STL and SARIMA model. The VaR has coverage probability as well as close 1-α. Thus, we propose to set α as parameter to estimate VaR. Consequently, the performance of VaR will depend not only on parameter model but also α. Our aim estimates VaR with minimum α based on correct VaR value. Numerical analysis is carried out to illustrate the estimative VaR.

Model Input and Optimization: Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Our COVID-19 Hospitalization Forecasts

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, public-health decision makers have increasingly relied on hospitalization forecasts that are routinely provided, accurate, and based on timely input data to inform pandemic planning. In North Carolina, we adapted an existing agent-based model (ABM) to produce 30-day hospitalization forecasts of COVID-19 and non–COVID-19 hospitalizations for use by public-health decision makers. We sought to continually improve model speed and accuracy during forecasting. Methods: The geospatially explicit ABM included movement of agents (ie, patients) among 104 short-term acute-care hospitals, 10 long-term acute-care hospitals, 421 licensed nursing homes, and the community in North Carolina. Agents were based on a synthetic population of North Carolina residents (ie, >10.4 million agents). We assigned SARS-CoV-2 infections to agents according to county-level susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered (SEIR) models informed by reported COVID-19 cases by county. Agents’ COVID-19 severity and probability of hospitalization were determined using agent-specific characteristics (eg, age, comorbidities). During May 2020–December 2020, we produced weekly 30-day forecasts of intensive care unit (ICU) and non-ICU bed occupancy for COVID-19 agents and non–COVID-19 agents statewide and by region under a range of SARS-CoV-2 effective reproduction numbers. During the reporting period, we identified optimizations for faster results turnaround. We evaluated the incorporation of real-time hospital-level occupancy data at model initialization on forecast accuracy using mean absolute percent error (MAPE). Results: During May 2020–December 2020, we provided 31 weekly reports of 30-day hospitalization forecasts with a 1-day turnaround time. Reports included (1) raw and smoothed 7-day average values for 42 model output variables; (2) static visuals of ICU and non-ICU bed demand and capacity; and (3) an interactive Tableau workbook of hospital demand variables. Identifying code efficiencies reduced a single model runtime from ~100 seconds to 28 seconds. The use of cloud computing reduced simulation runtime from ~20 hours to 15 minutes. Across forecasts, the average MAPEs were 21.6% and 7.1% for ICU and non-ICU bed demand, respectively. By incorporating hospital-level occupancy data, we reduced the average MAPE to 6.5% for ICU bed demand and 3.9% for non-ICU bed demand, indicating improved accuracy. Conclusions: We adapted an ABM and continually improved it during COVID-19 forecasting by optimizing code and computing resources and including real-time hospital-level occupancy data. Planned SEIR model updates for enhanced forecasts include the addition of compartments for undocumented infections and recoveries as well as permission of reinfection from recovered compartments.Funding: NoDisclosures: None

Analysis and forecast of COVID-19 in India, USA and Italy - an application of ARIMA Model

Background Corona virus disease (COVID-2019) is a severe ongoing novel pandemic that is spreading rapidly across the world. Analyzing and predicting COVID-19 prevalence will help governments to take necessary actions in controlling the spread. Time series analysis has proved to be efficient for estimating future impact in such circumstances. Methods Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models were developed to predict the epidemiological trend of pandemic in India, The USA and Italy up-to 20 July 2020. A 15 day forecast were made to study the future scenario. Results We could identify that all the countries had a linear trend in the increase of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases. Our studies produced a 15 day forecast results for India, US and Italy. the 95% PI for 20 July 2020 are, (25821.72 , 32991.38), (44278.89 , 87095.68) and (-2935.20, 2685.14) respectively for the three countries. Conclusion The US and India will have a rise in number of daily counts of COVID-19. Italy will gradually slow the pace. It is supposed that the present prediction models will assist the government and medical personnel to be prepared for the upcoming conditions and have more readiness in healthcare systems.

Public mobility data enables COVID-19 forecasting and management at local and global scales

Policymakers everywhere are working to determine the set of restrictions that will effectively contain the spread of COVID-19 without excessively stifling economic activity. We show that publicly available data on human mobility—collected by Google, Facebook, and other providers—can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and forecast the spread of COVID-19. This approach uses simple and transparent statistical models to estimate the effect of NPIs on mobility, and basic machine learning methods to generate 10-day forecasts of COVID-19 cases. An advantage of the approach is that it involves minimal assumptions about disease dynamics, and requires only publicly-available data. We evaluate this approach using local and regional data from China, France, Italy, South Korea, and the United States, as well as national data from 80 countries around the world. We find that NPIs are associated with significant reductions in human mobility, and that changes in mobility can be used to forecast COVID-19 infections.

Combining probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed forecasting models at the forefront of health policy making. Predictions of mortality, cases and hospitalisations help governments meet planning and resource allocation challenges. In this paper, we consider the weekly forecasting of the cumulative mortality due to COVID-19 at the national and state level in the U.S. Optimal decision-making requires a forecast of a probability distribution, rather than just a single point forecast. Interval forecasts are also important, as they can support decision making and provide situational awareness. We consider the case where probabilistic forecasts have been provided by multiple forecasting teams, and we combine the forecasts to extract the wisdom of the crowd. We use a dataset that has been made publicly available from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub. A notable feature of the dataset is that the availability of forecasts from participating teams varies greatly across the 40 weeks in our study. We evaluate the accuracy of combining methods that have been previously proposed for interval forecasts and predictions of probability distributions. These include the use of the simple average, the median, and trimming methods. In addition, we propose several new weighted combining methods. Our results show that, although the median was very useful for the early weeks of the pandemic, the simple average was preferable thereafter, and that, as a history of forecast accuracy accumulates, the best results can be produced by a weighted combining method that uses weights that are inversely proportional to the historical accuracy of the individual forecasting teams.

Data Analysis, Modeling and Forecasting of COVID-19 using Machine Learning

Data Analysis, Modeling and Forecasting of COVID-19 using Machine Learning

Particle swarm optimization of partitions and fuzzy order for fuzzy time series forecasting of COVID-19

Major hyperparameters which affect fuzzy time series (FTS) forecasting are the number of partitions, length of partition intervals in the universe of discourse, and the fuzzy order. There are very few studies which have considered an integrated solution to optimize all the hyperparameters. In this paper, we strive to achieve optimum values of all three hyperparameters for fuzzy time series forecasting of the COVID-19 pandemic using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. We specifically propose two techniques, namely nested FTS-PSO and exhaustive search FTS-PSO for determining the optimal interval length, as an augmentation to the FTS-PSO model that optimizes the interval length and the fuzzy order. Nested PSO has two PSO loops: (i) the inner PSO optimizes the combination of fuzzy order and boundaries of intervals for a given number of partitions defined by the outer loop, and the resultant cost is fed back to the outer PSO; (ii) the outer PSO optimizes the number of partitions to reduce the cost while meeting the defined constraint. Exhaustive search FTS-PSO also has two loops where the inner loop is similar to nested FTS-PSO while the outer loop iterates over a pre-defined search space of number of partitions. We analyze the effectiveness of the two approaches by comparing with ARIMA, FbProphet, and the state-of-the-art FTS and FTS-PSO models. We adopt COVID-19 highly affected 10 countries worldwide to perform forecasting of coronavirus confirmed cases. We consider two phases of COVID-19 spread, one from the year 2020 and another from 2021. Our study provides an analytical aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic, and aims to achieve optimal number and length of intervals along with fuzzy order for FTS forecasting of COVID-19. The results prove that the exhaustive search FTS-PSO outperformed all the methods whereas nested FTS-PSO performed moderately well.

A new grey quadratic polynomial model and its application in the COVID-19 in China

This paper develops a new grey prediction model with quadratic polynomial term. Analytical expressions of the time response function and the restored values of the new model are derived by using grey model technique and mathematical tools. With observations of the confirmed cases, the death cases and the recovered cases from COVID-19 in China at the early stage, the proposed forecasting model is developed. The computational results demonstrate that the new model has higher precision than the other existing prediction models, which show the grey model has high accuracy in the forecasting of COVID-19.