ABSTRACT
This work is devoted to introduce a reliable, fast and highly accurate reservoir computer machine learning scheme to forecast time evolution of COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the COVID-19 official data related to susceptible cases, confirmed cases, and recovered cases in Egypt and Saudi Arabia are collected. They employed as the training data for suggested reservoir computer (RC) model. Then, detailed simulation experiments are carried out within specified time periods. The evolution of COVID-19 in Egypt and Saudi Arabia are predicted on the subsequent times intervals and compared with real validation test data. The forecasting accuracy is improved by computing the optimal output matrix which minimizes the normalized root mean square errors (NRMSEs). The performance of RC scheme is evaluated when different-size training data, different-size test data, and different number of internal nodes are used. The comparisons with the robust LSTM deep learning techniques are performed. It is shown that the presented RC-based forecasting technique is more accurate for long-time forecasting, faster, and has lower computational cost. © 2023 THE AUTHORS