The novel coronavirus disease 2019 COVID-19 has been leading the world into a prominent crisis. As of May 19, 2020, the virus had spread to 215 countries with more than 4,622,001 confirmed cases and 311,916 reported deaths worldwide, including Algeria with 7201 cases and 555 deaths. Analyze and forecast COVID-19 cases and deaths growth could be useful in many ways, governments could estimate medical equipment and take appropriate policy responses, and experts could approximate the peak and the end of the disease. In this work, we first train a time series Prophet model to analyze and forecast the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Algeria based on the previously reported numbers. Then, to better understand the spread and the properties of the COVID-19, we include external factors that may contribute to accelerate/slow the spread of the virus, construct a dataset from reliable sources, and conduct a large-scale data analysis considering 82 countries worldwide. The evaluation results show that the time series Prophet model accurately predicts the number of cases and deaths in Algeria with low RMSE scores of 218.87 and 4.79 respectively, while the forecast suggests that the total number of cases and deaths are expected to increase in the coming weeks. Moreover, the worldwide data-driven analysis reveals several correlations between the increase/decrease in the number of cases and deaths and external factors that may contribute to accelerate/slow the spread of the virus such as geographic, climatic, health, economic, and demographic factors.
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学生物复杂性研究所与倡议中心）
The COVID-19 pandemic represents the most significant public health disaster since the 1918 influenza pandemic. During pandemics such as COVID-19, timely and reliable spatio-temporal forecasting of epidemic dynamics is crucial. Deep learning-based time series models for forecasting have recently gained popularity and have been successfully used for epidemic forecasting. Here we focus on the design and analysis of deep learning-based models for COVID-19 forecasting. We implement multiple recurrent neural network-based deep learning models and combine them using the stacking ensemble technique. …
In mid of March 2020, Coronaviruses such as COVID-19 is declared as an international epidemic. More than 125000 confirmed cases and 4,607 death cases have been recorded around more than 118 countries. Unfortunately, a coronavirus vaccine is expected to take at least 18 months if it works at all. Moreover, COVID -19 epidemics can mutate into a more aggressive form. Day level information about the COVID -19 spread is crucial to measure the behavior of this new virus globally. Therefore, this study presents a comparison of day level forecasting models on COVID-19 affected cases using time series …
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 M…
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global public health crisis that has been declared a pandemic by World Health Organization. Forecasting country-wise COVID-19 cases is necessary to help policymakers and healthcare providers prepare for the future. This study explores the performance of several Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models and Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model in forecasting the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Time series of daily cumulative COVID-19 cases were used for generating 1-day, 3-day, and 5-day forecasts using several LSTM models and ARIMA. Tw…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a public health emergency of international concern affecting more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. As of September 30, 2020, it has caused a pandemic outbreak with more than 33 million confirmed infections and more than 1 million reported deaths worldwide. Several statistical, machine learning, and hybrid models have previously tried to forecast COVID-19 confirmed cases for profoundly affected countries. Due to extreme uncertainty and nonstationarity in the time series data, forecasting of COVID-19 confirmed cases has become a ver…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）
COVID-19 pandemic has an unprecedented impact all over the world since early 2020. During this public health crisis, reliable forecasting of the disease becomes critical for resource allocation and administrative planning. The results from compartmental models such as SIR and SEIR are popularly referred by CDC and news media. With more and more COVID-19 data becoming available, we examine the following question: Can a direct data-driven approach without modeling the disease spreading dynamics outperform the well referred compartmental models and their variants? In this paper, we show the possi…
The COVID-19 outbreak was initially reported in Wuhan, China, and it has been declared as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020 by WHO. It has now spread to over 180 countries, and it has gradually evolved into a worldwide pandemic, endangering the state of global public health and becoming a serious threat to the global community. To combat and prevent the spread of the disease, all individuals should be well-informed of the rapidly changing state of COVID-19. To accomplish this objective, I have built a website to analyze and deliver the latest state o…
Accurate forecasting of the U.K. gross value added (GVA) is fundamental for measuring the growth of the U.K. economy. A common nonstationarity in GVA data, such as the ABML series, is its increase in variance over time due to inflation. Transformed or inflation-adjusted series can still be challenging for classical stationarity-assuming forecasters. We adopt a different approach that works directly with the GVA series by advancing recent forecasting methods for locally stationary time series. Our approach results in more accurate and reliable forecasts, and continues to work well even when the…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈提分校）
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have major impact to health and medical infrastructure, economy, and agriculture. Prominent computational and mathematical models have been unreliable due to the complexity of the spread of infections. Moreover, lack of data collection and reporting makes modelling attempts difficult and unreliable. Hence, we need to re-look at the situation with reliable data sources and innovative forecasting models. Deep learning models such as recurrent neural networks are well suited for modelling spatiotemporal sequences. In this paper, we apply recurrent neural network…
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted delayed reporting as a significant impediment to effective disease surveillance and decision-making. In the absence of timely data, statistical models which account for delays can be adopted to nowcast and forecast cases or deaths. We discuss the four key sources of systematic and random variability in available data for COVID-19 and other diseases, and critically evaluate current state-of-the-art methods with respect to appropriately separating and capturing this variability. We present a general spatio-temporal hierarchical framework for correcting delay…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine（西北大学范伯格医学院）
COVID-19 has been a public health emergency of international concern since early 2020. Reliable forecasting is critical to diminish the impact of this disease. To date, a large number of different forecasting models have been proposed, mainly including statistical models, compartmental models, and deep learning models. However, due to various uncertain factors across different regions such as economics and government policy, no forecasting model appears to be the best for all scenarios. In this paper, we perform quantitative analysis of COVID-19 forecasting of confirmed cases and deaths across…
China University of Geosciences, Beijing（中国地质大学（北京））；University of Nottingham Ningbo China（宁波诺丁汉大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Parking demand forecasting and behaviour analysis have received increasing attention in recent years because of their critical role in mitigating traffic congestion and understanding travel behaviours. However, previous studies usually only consider temporal dependence but ignore the spatial correlations among parking lots for parking prediction. This is mainly due to the lack of direct physical connections or observable interactions between them. Thus, how to quantify the spatial correlation remains a significant challenge. To bridge the gap, in this study, we propose a spatial-aware parking …
The University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
In this work, we study the pandemic course in the United States by considering national and state levels data. We propose and compare multiple time-series prediction techniques which incorporate auxiliary variables. One type of approach is based on spatio-temporal graph neural networks which forecast the pandemic course by utilizing a hybrid deep learning architecture and human mobility data. Nodes in this graph represent the state-level deaths due to COVID-19, edges represent the human mobility trend and temporal edges correspond to node attributes across time. The second approach is based on…
Knowledge of the current state of economies, how they respond to COVID-19 mitigations and indicators, and what the future might hold for them is important. We use recently-developed generalised network autoregressive (GNAR) models, using trade-determined networks, to model and forecast the Purchasing Managers' Indices for a number of countries. We use networks that link countries where the links themselves, or their weights, are determined by the degree of export trade between the countries. We extend these models to include node-specific time series exogenous variables (GNARX models), using t…
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many dashboards have emerged as useful tools to monitor the evolution of the pandemic, inform the public, and assist governments in decision making. Our goal is to develop a globally applicable method, integrated in a twice daily updated dashboard that provides an estimate of the trend in the evolution of the number of cases and deaths from reported data of more than 200 countries and territories, as well as a seven-day forecast. One of the significant difficulties to manage a quickly propagating epidemic is that the details of the dynamic needed t…
A year following the initial COVID-19 outbreak in China, many countries have approved emergency vaccines. Public-health practitioners and policymakers must understand the predicted populational willingness for vaccines and implement relevant stimulation measures. This study developed a framework for predicting vaccination uptake rate based on traditional clinical data-involving an autoregressive model with autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)- and innovative web search queries-involving a linear regression with ordinary least squares/least absolute shrinkage and selection operator,…
We present the winning strategy of an electricity demand forecasting competition. This competition was organized to design new forecasting methods for unstable periods such as the one starting in Spring 2020. We rely on state-space models to adapt standard statistical and machine learning models. We claim that it achieves the right compromise between two extremes. On the one hand, purely time-series models such as autoregressives are adaptive in essence but fail to capture dependence to exogenous variables. On the other hand, machine learning methods allow to learn complex dependence to explan…
The novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a severe respiratory infection that officially occurred in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. In late February, the disease began to spread quickly across the world, causing serious health, social, and economic emergencies. This paper aims to forecast the short to medium-term incidence of COVID-19 epidemic through the medium of an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, applied to Italy, Russia, and the USA The analysis is carried out on the number of new daily confirmed COVID-19 cases, collected by Worldometer website. The best ARIMA mo…
Islamic Azad University, Ardabil Branch（伊斯兰阿扎德大学阿尔达比勒分校）；Sama technical and vocational training college, Islamic Azad University, Ardabil branch（伊斯兰阿扎德大学阿尔达比勒分校萨马职业技术培训学院）；Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）
The recent global outbreak of covid-19 is affecting many countries around the world. Due to the growing number of newly infected individuals and the health-care system bottlenecks, it will be useful to predict the upcoming number of patients. This study aims to efficiently forecast the is used to estimate new cases, number of deaths, and number of recovered patients in Iran for 180 days, using the official dataset of the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education and the impact of control measures on the spread of COVID-19. Four different types of forecasting techniques, time series, and…
The outbreaks of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) have impacted the world significantly. Modeling the trend of infection and real-time forecasting of cases can help decision making and control of the disease spread. However, data-driven methods such as recurrent neural networks (RNN) can perform poorly due to limited daily samples in time. In this work, we develop an integrated spatiotemporal model based on the epidemic differential equations (SIR) and RNN. The former after simplification and discretization is a compact model of temporal infection trend of a region while the latter models t…
The need to forecast COVID-19 related variables continues to be pressing as the epidemic unfolds. Different efforts have been made, with compartmental models in epidemiology and statistical models such as AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Exponential Smoothing (ETS) or computing intelligence models. These efforts have proved useful in some instances by allowing decision makers to distinguish different scenarios during the emergency, but their accuracy has been disappointing, forecasts ignore uncertainties and less attention is given to local areas. In this study, we propose a s…
Autoregressive (AR) models are useful tools in time series analysis. Inferences under such models are distorted in the presence of measurement error, which is very common in practice. In this article, we establish analytical results for quantifying the biases of the parameter estimation in AR models if the measurement error effects are neglected. We propose two measurement error models to describe different processes of data contamination. An estimating equation approach is proposed for the estimation of the model parameters with measurement error effects accounted for. We further discuss fore…
Epidemic modeling is an essential tool to understand the spread of the novel coronavirus and ultimately assist in disease prevention, policymaking, and resource allocation. In this article, we establish a state of the art interface between classic mathematical and statistical models and propose a novel space-time epidemic modeling framework to study the spatial-temporal pattern in the spread of infectious disease. We propose a quasi-likelihood approach via the penalized spline approximation and alternatively reweighted least-squares technique to estimate the model. Furthermore, we provide a sh…
School of Mathematical Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学数学科学学院）；SJTU-Paristech Elite Institute of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学-巴黎高科精英理工学院）；Institute for Data and Decision Analytics, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）数据与决策分析研究所）；Normandie University（诺曼底大学）；INSA Rouen（鲁恩国立应用科学学院）；UNIROUEN（鲁昂大学）；UNIHAVRE（勒阿弗尔大学）；LITIS（信息处理与系统实验室）
We established a Spatio-Temporal Neural Network, namely STNN, to forecast the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak worldwide in 2020. The basic structure of STNN is similar to the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) incorporating with not only temporal data but also spatial features. Two improved STNN architectures, namely the STNN with Augmented Spatial States (STNN-A) and the STNN with Input Gate (STNN-I), are proposed, which ensure more predictability and flexibility. STNN and its variants can be trained using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm and its improved variants (e.g., Ad…
Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf e.V. (HZDR)（亥姆霍兹德累斯顿罗森多尔夫研究中心（HZDR））；Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)（亥姆霍兹环境研究中心（UFZ））
Throughout the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, decision makers have relied on forecasting models to determine and implement non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI). In building the forecasting models, continuously updated datasets from various stakeholders including developers, analysts, and testers are required to provide precise predictions. Here we report the design of a scalable pipeline which serves as a data synchronization to support inter-country top-down spatiotemporal observations and forecasting models of COVID-19, named the where2test, for Germany, Czechia and Poland. …
House of Energy Markets and Finance（能源市场与金融研究院）；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）
We present a winning method of the IEEE DataPort Competition on Day-Ahead Electricity Demand Forecasting: Post-COVID Paradigm. The day-ahead load forecasting approach is based on online forecast combination of multiple point prediction models. It contains four steps: i) data cleaning and preprocessing, ii) a holiday adjustment procedure, iii) training of individual forecasting models, iv) forecast combination by smoothed Bernstein Online Aggregation (BOA). The approach is flexible and can quickly adopt to new energy system situations as they occurred during and after COVID-19 shutdowns. The po…
Machine Learning and ARIMA Model Averaging for Adaptive Public Health Forecasting: Comparative Evaluation and an Ontario COVID-19 Case Study
Public Health Ontario（安大略省公共卫生局）；Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto（多伦多大学达拉·拉纳公共卫生学院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；York University（约克大学）
This paper presents a data-based simple model for fitting the available data of the Covid-19 pandemic evolution in France. The time series concerning the 13 regions of mainland France have been considered for fitting and validating the model. An extremely simple, two-dimensional model with only two parameters demonstrated to be able to reproduce the time series concerning the number of daily demises caused by Covid-19, the hospitalizations, intensive care and emergency accesses, the daily number of positive test and other indicators, for the different French regions. These results might contri…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant effort has gone into developing ML-driven epidemic forecasting techniques. However, benchmarks do not exist to claim if a new AI/ML technique is better than the existing ones. The "covid-forecast-hub" is a collection of more than 30 teams, including us, that submit their forecasts weekly to the CDC. It is not possible to declare whether one method is better than the other using those forecasts because each team's submission may correspond to different techniques over the period and involve human interventions as the teams are continuously changing/tu…
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, reliable prediction plays an important role for policy making. The classical infectious disease model SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered) is a compact yet simplistic temporal model. The data-driven machine learning models such as RNN (recurrent neural networks) can suffer in case of limited time series data such as COVID-19. In this paper, we combine SEIR and RNN on a graph structure to develop a hybrid spatio-temporal model to achieve both accuracy and efficiency in training and forecasting. We introduce two features on the graph structure: node f…
Most COVID-19 studies commonly report figures of the overall infection at a state- or county-level. This aggregation tends to miss out on fine details of virus propagation. In this paper, we analyze a high-resolution COVID-19 dataset in Cali, Colombia, that records the precise time and location of every confirmed case. We develop a non-stationary spatio-temporal point process equipped with a neural network-based kernel to capture the heterogeneous correlations among COVID-19 cases. The kernel is carefully crafted to enhance expressiveness while maintaining model interpretability. We also incor…
College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院计算学院）；Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学计算机系）；Department of Computer Science, University of Iowa（爱荷华大学计算机系）
Forecasting influenza in a timely manner aids health organizations and policymakers in adequate preparation and decision making. However, effective influenza forecasting still remains a challenge despite increasing research interest. It is even more challenging amidst the COVID pandemic, when the influenza-like illness (ILI) counts are affected by various factors such as symptomatic similarities with COVID-19 and shift in healthcare seeking patterns of the general population. Under the current pandemic, historical influenza models carry valuable expertise about the disease dynamics but face di…
We introduce a minimalist outbreak forecasting model that combines data-driven parameter estimation with variational data assimilation. By focusing on the fundamental components of nonlinear disease transmission and representing data in a domain where model stochasticity simplifies into a process with independent increments, we design an approach that only requires four core parameters to be estimated. We illustrate this novel methodology on COVID-19 forecasts. Results include case count and deaths predictions for the US and all of its 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The …
We introduce a Bayesian sequential data assimilation method for COVID-19 forecasting. It is assumed that suitable transmission, epidemic and observation models are available and previously validated and the transmission and epidemic models are coded into a dynamical system. The observation model depends on the dynamical system state variables and parameters, and is cast as a likelihood function. We elicit prior distributions of the effective population size, the dynamical system initial conditions and infectious contact rate, and use Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling to make inference and pred…
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 1- to 4-weeks in advance.It also forecasts the probability of changes in those government policies at each of these future ti…
The unprecedented coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is still a worldwide threat to human life since its invasion into the daily lives of the public in the first several months of 2020. Predicting the size of confirmed cases is important for countries and communities to make proper prevention and control policies so as to effectively curb the spread of COVID-19. Different from the 2003 SARS epidemic and the worldwide 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, COVID-19 has unique epidemiological characteristics in its infectious and recovered compartments. This drives us to formulate a new infecti…
RTI International（RTI国际）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
This Overview, Design Concepts, and Details Protocol (ODD) provides a detailed description of an agent-based model (ABM) that was developed to simulate hospitalizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the descriptions of submodels, provided parameters, and the links to data sources, modelers will be able to replicate the creation and results of this model.
COVID 19 is a disease that has abnormal over 170 nations worldwide. The number of infected people (either sick or dead) has been growing at a worrying ratio in virtually all the affected countries. Forecasting procedures can be instructed so helping in scheming well plans and in captivating creative conclusions. These procedures measure the conditions of the previous thus allowing well forecasts around the state to arise in the future. These predictions strength helps to make contradiction of likely pressures and significances. Forecasting procedures production a very main character in elastic…
In this article, we take a step back to distill seven principles out of our experience in the spring of 2020, when our 12-person rapid-response team used skills of data science and beyond to help distribute Covid PPE. This process included tapping into domain knowledge of epidemiology and medical logistics chains, curating a relevant data repository, developing models for short-term county-level death forecasting in the US, and building a website for sharing visualization (an automated AI machine). The principles are described in the context of working with Response4Life, a then-new nonprofit …
As COVID-19 pandemic progresses, severe flu seasons may happen alongside an increase in cases in cases and death of COVID-19, causing severe burdens on health care resources and public safety. A consequence of a twindemic may be a mixture of two different infections in the same person at the same time, "flurona". Admist the raising trend of "flurona", forecasting both influenza outbreaks and COVID-19 waves in a timely manner is more urgent than ever, as accurate joint real-time tracking of the twindemic aids health organizations and policymakers in adequate preparation and decision making. Und…
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused tremendous amount of deaths and a devastating impact on the economic development all over the world. Thus, it is paramount to control its further transmission, for which purpose it is necessary to find the mechanism of its transmission process and evaluate the effect of different control strategies. To deal with these issues, we describe the transmission of COVID-19 as an explosive Markov process with four parameters. The state transitions of the proposed Markov process can clearly disclose the terrible explosion and complex heterogen…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has urged many governments in the world to enforce a strict lockdown where all nonessential businesses are closed and citizens are ordered to stay at home. One of the consequences of this policy is a significant change in electricity consumption patterns. Since load forecasting models rely on calendar or meteorological information and are trained on historical data, they fail to capture the significant break caused by the lockdown and have exhibited poor performances since the beginning of the pandemic. This makes the scheduling of the electrici…
For hospitals, realistic forecasting of bed demand during impending epidemics of infectious diseases is essential to avoid being overwhelmed by a potential sudden increase in the number of admitted patients. Short-term forecasting can aid hospitals in adjusting their planning and freeing up beds in time. We created an easy-to-use online on-request tool based on local data to forecast COVID-19 bed demand for individual hospitals. The tool is flexible and adaptable to different settings. It is based on a stochastic compartmental model for estimating the epidemic dynamics and coupled with an expo…
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；University of California, San Francisco（加利福尼亚大学旧金山分校）；Chan Zuckerberg Biohub（陈·扎克伯格生物中心）
As the COVID-19 outbreak evolves, accurate forecasting continues to play an extremely important role in informing policy decisions. In this paper, we present our continuous curation of a large data repository containing COVID-19 information from a range of sources. We use this data to develop predictions and corresponding prediction intervals for the short-term trajectory of COVID-19 cumulative death counts at the county-level in the United States up to two weeks ahead. Using data from January 22 to June 20, 2020, we develop and combine multiple forecasts using ensembling techniques, resulting…
Faced with the 2020 SARS-CoV2 epidemic, public health officials have been seeking models that could be used to predict not only the number of new cases but also the levels of hospitalisation, critical care and deaths. In this paper we present a stochastic compartmental model capable of real-time monitoring and forecasting of the pandemic incorporating multiple streams of real-world data, reported cases, testing intensity, deaths, hospitalisations and critical care occupancy. Model parameters are estimated via a Bayesian particle filtering technique. The model successfully tracks the key variab…
University of Peradeniya（佩拉德尼亚大学）；Sri Lanka Technological Campus（斯里兰卡科技大学校区）；University of Colombo（科伦坡大学）
COVID-19 continues to cause a significant impact on public health. To minimize this impact, policy makers undertake containment measures that however, when carried out disproportionately to the actual threat, as a result if errorneous threat assessment, cause undesirable long-term socio-economic complications. In addition, macro-level or national level decision making fails to consider the localized sensitivities in small regions. Hence, the need arises for region-wise threat assessments that provide insights on the behaviour of COVID-19 through time, enabled through accurate forecasts. In thi…
Motivated by the current Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which is due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the important problem of forecasting daily deaths and cumulative deaths, this paper examines the construction of prediction regions or intervals under the Poisson regression model and for an over-dispersed Poisson regression model. For the Poisson regression model, several prediction regions are developed and their performance are compared through simulation studies. The methods are applied to the problem of forecasting daily and cumulative deaths in the United States (US) due to COVID-1…
The continuously growing number of COVID-19 cases pressures healthcare services worldwide. Accurate short-term forecasting is thus vital to support country-level policy making. The strategies adopted by countries to combat the pandemic vary, generating different uncertainty levels about the actual number of cases. Accounting for the hierarchical structure of the data and accommodating extra-variability is therefore fundamental. We introduce a new modelling framework to describe the course of the pandemic with great accuracy, and provide short-term daily forecasts for every country in the world…
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed forecasting models at the forefront of health policy making. Predictions of mortality and hospitalization 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 pr…
Governments around the world continue to act to contain and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The rapidly evolving situation compels officials and executives to continuously adapt policies and social distancing measures depending on the current state of the spread of the disease. In this context, it is crucial for policymakers to have a firm grasp on what the current state of the pandemic is as well as to have an idea of how the infective situation is going to unfold in the next days. However, as in many other situations of compulsorily-notifiable diseases and beyond, cases are reported with de…
Understanding the joint impact of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 development is important for making public health decisions that control the pandemic. Recently, we created a method in forecasting the daily number of confirmed cases of infectious diseases by combining a mechanistic ordinary differential equation (ODE) model for infectious classes and a generalized boosting machine learning model (GBM) for predicting how public health policies and mobility data affect the transmission rate in the ODE model [WWR+]. In this paper, we extend the method to the post-vac…
We develop a novel temporal complex network approach to quantify the US county level spread dynamics of COVID-19. The objective is to study the effects of the local spread dynamics, COVID-19 cases and death, and Google search activities on the US stock market. We use both conventional econometric and Machine Learning (ML) models. The results suggest that COVID-19 cases and deaths, its local spread, and Google searches have impacts on abnormal stock prices between January 2020 to May 2020. In addition, incorporating information about local spread significantly improves the performance of foreca…
The novel Corona Virus COVID-19 arrived on Australian shores around 25 January 2020. This paper presents a novel method of dynamically modeling and forecasting the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia with a high degree of accuracy and in a timely manner using limited data; a valuable resource that can be used to guide government decision-making on societal restrictions on a daily and/or weekly basis. The "partially-observable stochastic process" used in this study predicts not only the future actual values with extremely low error, but also the percentage of unobserved COVID-19 cases in the populat…
Forecasting crop yields is important for food security, in particular to predict where crop production is likely to drop. Climate records and remotely-sensed data have become instrumental sources of data for crop yield forecasting systems. Similarly, machine learning methods are increasingly used to process big Earth observation data. However, access to data necessary to train such algorithms is often limited in food-insecure countries. Here, we evaluate the performance of machine learning algorithms and small data to forecast yield on a monthly basis between the start and the end of the growi…
