ABSTRACT
Globally, many research works are going on to study the infectious nature of COVID-19 and every day we learn something new about it through the flooding of the huge data that are accumulating hourly rather than daily which instantly opens hot research avenues for artificial intelligence researchers. However, the public's concern by now is to find answers for two questions; (1) When this COVID-19 pandemic will be over? and (2) After coming to its end, will COVID-19 return again in what is known as a second rebound of the pandemic? In this work, we developed a predictive model that can estimate the expected period that the virus can be stopped and the risk of the second rebound of COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we have considered the SARIMA model to predict the spread of the virus on several selected countries and used it for predicting the COVID-19 pandemic life cycle and its end. The study can be applied to predict the same for other countries as the nature of the virus is the same everywhere. The proposed model investigates the statistical estimation of the slowdown period of the pandemic which is extracted based on the concept of normal distribution. The advantages of this study are that it can help governments to act and make sound decisions and plan for future so that the anxiety of the people can be minimized and prepare the mentality of people for the next phases of the pandemic. Based on the experimental results and simulation, the most striking finding is that the proposed algorithm shows the expected COVID-19 infections for the top countries of the highest number of confirmed cases will be manifested between Dec-2020 and Apr-2021. Moreover, our study forecasts that there may be a second rebound of the pandemic in a year time if the currently taken precautions are eased completely. We have to consider the uncertain nature of the current COVID-19 pandemic and the growing inter-connected and complex world, that are ultimately demanding flexibility, robustness and resilience to cope with the unexpected future events and scenarios.
ABSTRACT
Nowadays, a significant number of infectious diseases such as human coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are threatening the world by spreading at an alarming rate. Some of the literatures pointed out that the pandemic is exhibiting seasonal patterns in its spread, incidence and nature of the distribution. In connection to the spread and distribution of the infection, scientific analysis that answers the questions whether the next summer can save people from COVID-19 is required. Many researchers have been exclusively asked whether high temperature during summer can slow down the spread of the COVID-19 as it has with other seasonal flues. Since there are a lot of questions that are unanswered right now, and many mysteries aspects about the COVID-19 that is still unknown to us, in-depth study and analysis of associated weather features are required. Moreover, understanding the nature of COVID-19 and forecasting the spread of COVID-19 request more investigation of the real effect of weather variables on the transmission of the COVID-19 among people. In this work, various regressor machine learning models are proposed to extract the relationship between different factors and the spreading rate of COVID-19. The machine learning algorithms employed in this work estimate the impact of weather variables such as temperature and humidity on the transmission of COVID-19 by extracting the relationship between the number of confirmed cases and the weather variables on certain regions. To validate the proposed method, we have collected the required datasets related to weather and census features and necessary prepossessing is carried out. From the experimental results, it is shown that the weather variables are more relevant in predicting the mortality rate when compared to the other census variables such as population, age, and urbanization. Thus, from this result, we can conclude that temperature and humidity are important features for predicting COVID-19 mortality rate. Moreover, it is indicated that the higher the value of temperature the lower number of infection cases.