Forecasting Of COVID-19 Research Articles

Utilization of Artificial Intelligence in Meeting the Challenges of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Quick Literature Review

The world is facing several challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is causing severe social and economic disruption. The disruption has resulted in recession, unemployment, and social isolation and has caused an extreme burden on health care services. Artificial intelligence (AI) has a promising role in the healthcare sector by bringing many advantages to practicing clinicians, patients, and society. This article aims to determine the role of artificial intelligence in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A quantitative methodology is used, and a literature review is done by using electronic databases such as PubMed, Google Scholar, and Scopus. The keywords used for this data research are "artificial intelligence" and "COVID 19"; "COVID 19" and "artificial intelligence". The results have shown that artificial intelligence has been extensively used in seven major domains during the current ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These include screening and detection of COVID-19 transmission dynamics, diagnostics, disease monitoring and forecasting, disease outbreak containment, disease recovery and mortality, treatment and vaccination, and protection of healthcare workers. Artificial intelligence is a transformational force in the medical field. It assists in early detection of disease, real-time surveillance, diagnosis, treatment, disease containment, development of treatment and vaccinations, and reducing morbidity and mortality. Artificial intelligence will help us in the future to meet many challenges in a timely fashion through the prediction of pandemics, making stakeholders worldwide well prepared to deal with epidemics and pandemics in a systematic and organized manner, avoiding economic turmoil and unnecessary morbidity and mortality.

Comparative study of a mathematical epidemic model, statistical modeling, and deep learning for COVID-19 forecasting and management

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis with 47,209,305 confirmed cases and 1,209,505 confirmed deaths worldwide as of November 2, 2020. Forecasting confirmed cases and understanding the virus dynamics is necessary to provide valuable insights into the growth of the outbreak and facilitate policy-making regarding virus containment and utilization of medical resources. In this study, we applied a mathematical epidemic model (MEM), statistical model, and recurrent neural network (RNN) variants to forecast the cumulative confirmed cases. We proposed a reproducible framework for RNN variants that addressed the stochastic nature of RNN variants leveraging z-score outlier detection. We incorporated heterogeneity in susceptibility into the MEM considering lockdowns and the dynamic dependency of the transmission and identification rates which were estimated using Poisson likelihood fitting. While the experimental results demonstrated the superiority of RNN variants in forecasting accuracy, the MEM presented comprehensive insights into the virus spread and potential control strategies.

Current forecast of COVID-19 in Mexico: A Bayesian and machine learning approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been widely spread and affected millions of people and caused hundreds of deaths worldwide, especially in patients with comorbilities and COVID-19. This manuscript aims to present models to predict, firstly, the number of coronavirus cases and secondly, the hospital care demand and mortality based on COVID-19 patients who have been diagnosed with other diseases. For the first part, I present a projection of the spread of coronavirus in Mexico, which is based on a contact tracing model using Bayesian inference. I investigate the health profile of individuals diagnosed with coronavirus to predict their type of patient care (inpatient or outpatient) and survival. Specifically, I analyze the comorbidity associated with coronavirus using Machine Learning. I have implemented two classifiers: I use the first classifier to predict the type of care procedure that a person diagnosed with coronavirus presenting chronic diseases will obtain (i.e. outpatient or hospitalised), in this way I estimate the hospital care demand; I use the second classifier to predict the survival or mortality of the patient (i.e. survived or deceased). I present two techniques to deal with these kinds of unbalanced datasets related to outpatient/hospitalised and survived/deceased cases (which occur in general for these types of coronavirus datasets) to obtain a better performance for the classification.

A spatiotemporal machine learning approach to forecasting COVID-19 incidence at the county level in the USA.

With COVID-19 affecting every country globally and changing everyday life, the ability to forecast the spread of the disease is more important than any previous epidemic. The conventional methods of disease-spread modeling, compartmental models, are based on the assumption of spatiotemporal homogeneity of the spread of the virus, which may cause forecasting to underperform, especially at high spatial resolutions. In this paper, we approach the forecasting task with an alternative technique—spatiotemporal machine learning. We present COVID-LSTM, a data-driven model based on a long short-term memory deep learning architecture for forecasting COVID-19 incidence at the county level in the USA. We use the weekly number of new positive cases as temporal input, and hand-engineered spatial features from Facebook movement and connectedness datasets to capture the spread of the disease in time and space. COVID-LSTM outperforms the COVID-19 Forecast Hub’s Ensemble model (COVIDhub-ensemble) on our 17-week evaluation period, making it the first model to be more accurate than the COVIDhub-ensemble over one or more forecast periods. Over the 4-week forecast horizon, our model is on average 50 cases per county more accurate than the COVIDhub-ensemble. We highlight that the underutilization of data-driven forecasting of disease spread prior to COVID-19 is likely due to the lack of sufficient data available for previous diseases, in addition to the recent advances in machine learning methods for spatiotemporal forecasting. We discuss the impediments to the wider uptake of data-driven forecasting, and whether it is likely that more deep learning-based models will be used in the future.

Stochastic forecasting of COVID-19 daily new cases across countries with a novel hybrid time series model.

An unprecedented outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the form of peculiar pneumonia has spread globally since its first case in Wuhan province, China, in December 2019. Soon after, the infected cases and mortality increased rapidly. The future of the pandemic’s progress was uncertain, and thus, predicting it became crucial for public health researchers. These predictions help the effective allocation of health-care resources, stockpiling, and help in strategic planning for clinicians, government authorities, and public health policymakers after understanding the extent of the effect. The main objective of this paper is to develop a hybrid forecasting model that can generate real-time out-of-sample forecasts of COVID-19 outbreaks for five profoundly affected countries, namely the USA, Brazil, India, the UK, and Canada. A novel hybrid approach based on the Theta method and autoregressive neural network (ARNN) model, named Theta-ARNN (TARNN) model, is developed. Daily new cases of COVID-19 are nonlinear, non-stationary, and volatile; thus, a single specific model cannot be ideal for future prediction of the pandemic. However, the newly introduced hybrid forecasting model with an acceptable prediction error rate can help healthcare and government for effective planning and resource allocation. The proposed method outperforms traditional univariate and hybrid forecasting models for the test datasets on an average.

SIMLR: Machine Learning inside the SIR Model for COVID-19 Forecasting

Accurate forecasts of the number of newly infected people during an epidemic are critical for making effective timely decisions. This paper addresses this challenge using the SIMLR model, which incorporates machine learning (ML) into the epidemiological SIR model. For each region, SIMLR tracks the changes in the policies implemented at the government level, which it uses to estimate the time-varying parameters of an SIR model for forecasting the number of new infections one to four weeks in advance. It also forecasts the probability of changes in those government policies at each of these future times, which is essential for the longer-range forecasts. We applied SIMLR to data from in Canada and the United States, and show that its mean average percentage error is as good as state-of-the-art forecasting models, with the added advantage of being an interpretable model. We expect that this approach will be useful not only for forecasting COVID-19 infections, but also in predicting the evolution of other infectious diseases.

Automated Machine Learning for COVID-19 Forecasting

When responding to a pandemic situation, policy makers rely on forecasts of the spread. In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, various sophisticated epidemic and machine learning models have been used for forecasting. These models, however, rely on carefully selected architectures and detailed data that is often only available for specific regions. Automated machine learning (AutoML) addresses these challenges by allowing to automatically create forecasting pipelines in a data-driven manner, resulting in high-quality predictions. In this paper we study the role of open data along with AutoML systems in acquiring high-performance forecasting models for COVID-19. Here, we adapted the AutoML framework auto-sklearn to the time series forecasting task and introduced two variants for multi-step ahead COVID-19 forecasting which we refer to as (a) multi-output and (b) repeated single output forecasting. We studied the usefulness of anonymized open mobility data sets (place visits, and the use of different transportation modes) in addition to open mortality data. We evaluated three drift adaptation strategies to deal with concept drifts in data by (i) refitting our models on part of the data, (ii) the full data, or (iii) retraining the models completely. We compared the performance of our AutoML methods in terms of RMSE with five baselines on two testing periods (over 2020 and 2021). Our results show that combining mobility features and mortality data improves forecasting accuracy. Furthermore, we show that when faced with concept drifts, our method refitted on recent data using place visits mobility features outperforms all other approaches for 22 of the 26 countries considered in our study.

Deep Learning–Based Forecasting of COVID-19 in India

Abstract During the past two decades, the world has confronted many pandemic disease outbreaks. Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Middle East respiratory syndrome, and, recently, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have had a massive global impact in terms of stress on local and global human health, economic destruction, and, above all, damage to usual human life. Analyzing past similar infections will help in drawing inferences such as maintaining social distancing, herd immunity, and vaccinating massively to go forward beyond this pandemic. The development of a forecasting model of COVID-19 infectious disease spreading rate plays a vital role in the future preparation of hospital facilities, such as setting up isolated wards, oxygen cylinders, and ventilators, etc., for future patients by the government. Also, the forecasting technique and model is in immediate need for us to understand and face the effect of this and future pandemics. The main objective of this work is to develop an intelligent model based on deep learning for forecasting or estimating COVID-19 future spreading rate in terms of confirmed, recovered, and deceased cases of 85 days in 4 states in India and India overall. Deep learning neural networks, a kind of machine learning technique, are a powerful tool to predict the future because of their nature of discovering complex nonlinear dependencies. A deep learning long short-term memory (LSTM) network, which is explicitly designed for learning long-term dependencies, is utilized in this work. Hence, one can predict 1 day ahead to any number of (up to 400) days ahead by using this model. To evaluate the performance of the deep learning forecasting model and to endorse its forecasting accuracy, the criteria of mean absolute error, mean square error, root mean square error, mean absolute percentage error, and Ro are used. The results of the proposed deep learning–based LSTM model are validated by statistical analysis and graphical analysis. Moreover, the proposed model exhibited superior forecasting accuracy.

Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations.

The prevalence of inadequate SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) responses may indicate a lack of trust in forecasts and risk communication. However, no work has empirically tested how multiple forecast visualization choices impact trust and task-based performance. The three studies presented in this paper ( N=1299) examine how visualization choices impact trust in COVID-19 mortality forecasts and how they influence performance in a trend prediction task. These studies focus on line charts populated with real-time COVID-19 data that varied the number and color encoding of the forecasts and the presence of best/worst-case forecasts. The studies reveal that trust in COVID-19 forecast visualizations initially increases with the number of forecasts and then plateaus after 6-9 forecasts. However, participants were most trusting of visualizations that showed less visual information, including a 95% confidence interval, single forecast, and grayscale encoded forecasts. Participants maintained high trust in intervals labeled with 50% and 25% and did not proportionally scale their trust to the indicated interval size. Despite the high trust, the 95% CI condition was the most likely to evoke predictions that did not correspond with the actual COVID-19 trend. Qualitative analysis of participants' strategies confirmed that many participants trusted both the simplistic visualizations and those with numerous forecasts. This work provides practical guides for how COVID-19 forecast visualizations influence trust, including recommendations for identifying the range where forecasts balance trade-offs between trust and task-based performance.

Transmission Dynamics and Short-Term Forecasts of COVID-19: Nepal 2020/2021.

Nepal was hard hit by a second wave of COVID-19 from April-May 2021. We investigated the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 at the national and provincial levels by using data on laboratory-confirmed RT-PCR positive cases from the official national situation reports. We performed 8 week-to-week sequential forecasts of 10-days and 20-days at national level using three dynamic phenomenological growth models from 5 March 2021-22 May 2021. We also estimated effective and instantaneous reproduction numbers at national and provincial levels using established methods and evaluated the mobility trends using Google's mobility data. Our forecast estimates indicated a declining trend of COVID-19 cases in Nepal as of June 2021. Sub-epidemic and Richards models provided reasonable short-term projections of COVID-19 cases based on standard performance metrics. There was a linear pattern in the trajectory of COVID-19 incidence during the first wave (deceleration of growth parameter (p) = 0.41-0.43, reproduction number (Rt) at 1.1 (95% CI: 1.1, 1.2)), and a sub-exponential growth pattern in the second wave (p = 0.61 (95% CI: 0.58, 0.64)) and Rt at 1.3 (95% CI: 1.3, 1.3)). Across provinces, Rt ranged from 1.2 to 1.5 during the early growth phase of the second wave. The instantaneous Rt fluctuated around 1.0 since January 2021 indicating well sustained transmission. The peak in mobility across different areas coincided with an increasing incidence trend of COVID-19. In conclusion, we found that the sub-epidemic and Richards models yielded reasonable short-terms projections of the COVID-19 trajectory in Nepal, which are useful for healthcare utilization planning.

Can auxiliary indicators improve COVID-19 forecasting and hotspot prediction?

Short-term forecasts of traditional streams from public health reporting (such as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths) are a key input to public health decision-making during a pandemic. Since early 2020, our research group has worked with data partners to collect, curate, and make publicly available numerous real-time COVID-19 indicators, providing multiple views of pandemic activity in the United States. This paper studies the utility of five such indicators-derived from deidentified medical insurance claims, self-reported symptoms from online surveys, and COVID-related Google search activity-from a forecasting perspective. For each indicator, we ask whether its inclusion in an autoregressive (AR) model leads to improved predictive accuracy relative to the same model excluding it. Such an AR model, without external features, is already competitive with many top COVID-19 forecasting models in use today. Our analysis reveals that 1) inclusion of each of these five indicators improves on the overall predictive accuracy of the AR model; 2) predictive gains are in general most pronounced during times in which COVID cases are trending in "flat" or "down" directions; and 3) one indicator, based on Google searches, seems to be particularly helpful during "up" trends.

US Equity Market Volatility Index Components, Impact on the Industrial Production Index and Post Covid-19 Forecasting: Relevance to Mexico

US Equity Market Volatility Index Components, Impact on the Industrial Production Index and Post Covid-19 Forecasting: Relevance to Mexico

An Improved COVID-19 Forecasting by Infectious Disease Modelling Using Machine Learning

The mechanisms of data analytics and machine learning can allow for a profound conceptualization of viruses (such as pathogen transmission rate and behavior). Consequently, such models have been widely employed to provide rapid and accurate viral spread forecasts to public health officials. Nevertheless, the capability of these algorithms to predict outbreaks is not capable of long-term predictions. Thus, the development of superior models is crucial to strengthen disease prevention strategies and long-term COVID-19 forecasting accuracy. This paper provides a comparative analysis of COVID-19 forecasting models, including the Deep Learning (DL) approach and its examination of the circulation and transmission of COVID-19 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE.

Spatiotemporal prediction of COVID-19 cases using inter- and intra-county proxies of human interactions

Measurements of human interaction through proxies such as social connectedness or movement patterns have proved useful for predictive modeling of COVID-19, which is a challenging task, especially at high spatial resolutions. In this study, we develop a Spatiotemporal autoregressive model to predict county-level new cases of COVID-19 in the coterminous US using spatiotemporal lags of infection rates, human interactions, human mobility, and socioeconomic composition of counties as predictive features. We capture human interactions through 1) Facebook- and 2) cell phone-derived measures of connectivity and human mobility, and use them in two separate models for predicting county-level new cases of COVID-19. We evaluate the model on 14 forecast dates between 2020/10/25 and 2021/01/24 over one- to four-week prediction horizons. Comparing our predictions with a Baseline model developed by the COVID-19 Forecast Hub indicates an average 6.46% improvement in prediction Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) over the two-week prediction horizon up to 20.22% improvement in the four-week prediction horizon, pointing to the strong predictive power of our model in the longer prediction horizons.

EPIsembleVis: A geo-visual analysis and comparison of the prediction ensembles of multiple COVID-19 models

We present EPIsembleVis, a web-based comparative visual analysis tool for evaluating the consistency of multiple COVID-19 prediction models. Our approach analyzes a collection of COVID-19 predictions from different epidemiological models as an ensemble and utilizes two metrics to quantify model performance. These metrics include (a) prediction uncertainty (represented as the dispersion of predictions in each ensemble) and (b) prediction error (calculated by comparing individual model predictions with the recorded data). Through an interactive visual interface, our approach provides a data-driven workflow for (a) selecting and constructing the COVID-19 model prediction ensemble based on the spatiotemporal overlap of available predictions of multiple epidemiological models, (b) quantifying the model performance using both the uncertainty of each model prediction ensemble, and the error of each ensemble member that represents individual model predictions, and (c) visualizing the spatiotemporal variability in the projection performance of individual models using a suite of novel ensemble visualization techniques, such as the data availability map, a spatiotemporal textured-tile calendar, multivariate rose chart, and time-series leaflet glyph. We demonstrate the capability of our ensemble visual interface through a case study that investigates the performance of weekly COVID-19 predictions, which are provided through the COVID-19 Forecast Hub UMass-Amherst Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence [47] for the United States and United States Territories. The EPIsembleVis tool is implemented using open-source web technologies and adaptive system design, rendering it interoperable with Elasticsearch and Kibana for automatically ingesting COVID-19 predictions from online repositories, and it is generalizable for analyzing worldwide projections from more epidemiological models.

A new logistic growth model applied to COVID-19 fatality data

Background:Recent work showed that the temporal growth of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) follows a sub-exponential power-law scaling whenever effective control interventions are in place. Taking this into consideration, we present a new phenomenological logistic model that is well-suited for such power-law epidemic growth. Methods:We empirically develop the logistic growth model using simple scaling arguments, known boundary conditions and a comparison with available data from four countries, Belgium, China, Denmark and Germany, where (arguably) effective containment measures were put in place during the first wave of the pandemic. A non-linear least-squares minimization algorithm is used to map the parameter space and make optimal predictions. Results:Unlike other logistic growth models, our presented model is shown to consistently make accurate predictions of peak heights, peak locations and cumulative saturation values for incomplete epidemic growth curves. We further show that the power-law growth model also works reasonably well when containment and lock down strategies are not as stringent as they were during the first wave of infections in 2020. On the basis of this agreement, the model was used to forecast COVID-19 fatalities for the third wave in South Africa, which was in progress during the time of this work. Conclusion:We anticipate that our presented model will be useful for a similar forecasting of COVID-19 induced infections/deaths in other regions as well as other cases of infectious disease outbreaks, particularly when power-law scaling is observed.

COVID-19 forecast for 13 Caribbean countries using ARIMA modeling for confirmed, death, and recovered cases

Background: The rapid spread of the Covid-19 virus in the Caribbean region has led to increased surveillance with an increasing trend of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 13 Caribbean countries. Our study aims to analyze the impact of Covid-19 (SARS nCoV-2) in 13 Caribbean countries in terms of the number of confirmed cases, deaths, and recovered cases. Methods: The study uses the ARIMA model based on the time series pattern according to data retrieved from John Hopkins University. The data were analyzed using Stata 14 SE software for the period January 22, 2020, and August 16, 2021, and forecasted till December 31, 2021. All chosen models were compared with other models in terms of various factors like AIC/BIC, log-likelihood, p-value significance, coefficient < 1, and 5% significance. The ACF and PACF graphs were plotted to reduce bias and select the best-fitting model. Results: The results show the predicted trend in terms of confirmed, death, and recovered cases of COVID-19 for 13 Caribbean countries. The projected ARIMA model forecast for the period December 16, 2021, to December 31, 2021, shows 2470272 (95% CI 2438965 - 2501579) confirmed cases, 27220 (95% CI 26886 - 27555) deaths, and 818105 (95% CI 818085 - 818125) recovered cases related to Covid-19. The final ARIMA model chosen for confirmed COVID-19 cases, several deaths, and recovered cases are ARIMA (9,2,4), ARIMA (1,2,1), and ARIMA (1,2,1), respectively. Conclusions As per the results of the forecasted COVID-19 models, there is a steady rise in confirmed, death, and recovered cases during the period June 1, 2020, until November 30, 2020, and April 1, 2021, until June 15, 2021. It shows an increasing trend for confirmed and recovered COVID-19 cases and a slowing of the number of deaths.

Globally local: Hyper-local modeling for accurate forecast of COVID-19

Importance:Assumption of a well-mixed population during modeling is often erroneously made without due analysis of its validity. Ignoring the importance of the geo-spatial granularity at which the data is collected could have significant implications on the quality of forecasts and the actionable clinical recommendations that are based on it. Objective:This paper’s primary objective is to test the hypothesis that the characteristic dynamics defining the trajectory of the pandemic in a region is lost when the data is aggregated and modeled at higher geo-spatial levels. Design:We use publicly available confirmed SARS-CoV-2 cases and deaths from January 1st, 2020 to August 3rd, 2020 in the United States at different geo-spatial granularities to conduct our experiments. To understand the impact of this hypothesis, the output of this study was implemented in Tampa General Hospital (TGH) to provide resource demand forecast. Results:The Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) in the forecast confirmed cases can be 30% higher for modeling at the state-level than aggregating model results at the scale of counties or clusters of counties. Similarly, modeling at a state-level and crafting policy decisions based on them may not be effective — county-level forecasts made by partitioning state-level forecasts are 3x worse for confirmed cases and 20x worse for deaths relative to the same model at the county level. By leveraging these results, TGH was able to accurately allocate clinical resources to tackle COVID-19 cases, continue elective surgical procedures largely uninterrupted and avoid costly construction of overflow capacity in the first two epidemic waves. Conclusions and Relevance:Accurate forecasting at the county level requires hyper-local modeling with county resolution. State-level modeling does not accurately predict community spread in smaller sub-regions because state populations are not well mixed, resulting in large prediction errors. Actionable decisions such as deciding whether to cancel planned surgeries or construct overflow capacity require models with local specificity.

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.