Modeling the Spread of COVID-19 by Leveraging Machine and Deep Learning Models

Corona Virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a worldwide pandemic of cough, fever, headache, body aches, and respiratory ailments. COVID-19 has now become a severe disease and one of the leading causes of death globally. Modeling and prediction of COVID-19 have become inevitable as it has affected people worldwide. With the availability of a large-scale universal COVID-19 dataset, machine learning (ML) techniques and algorithms occur to be the best choice for the analysis, modeling, and forecasting of this disease. In this research study, we used one deep learning algorithm called Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and several ML algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), polynomial regression, and Bayesian ridge regression (BRR) modeling for analysis, modeling, and spread prediction of COVID-19. COVID-19 dataset, maintained and updated by JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY was used for ML models training, testing, and modeling. The cost and error generated during ANN training process was reduced using technique called back propagation which dynamically adjust the synapses weights to perform better predictions. The ANN architecture included one input layer with 441 neurons, 4 hidden layers each have 90 neurons and one output layer. ANN along with other ML algorithms were trained to model the prediction of COVID-19 spread for the next 10 days. Experimental results showed that BRR technique overall performed better prediction of COVID-19 for the next 10 days. The modeling of infectious diseases can help relevant countries to take the necessary steps and make timely decisions.

Machine learning approach for COVID-19 detection on twitter

Social networking services (SNSs) provide massive data that can be a very influential source of information during pandemic outbreaks. This study shows that social media analysis can be used as a crisis detector (e.g., understanding the sentiment of social media users regarding various pandemic outbreaks). The novel Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19), commonly known as coronavirus, has affected everyone worldwide in 2020. Streaming Twitter data have revealed the status of the COVID-19 outbreak in the most affected regions. This study focuses on identifying COVID-19 patients using tweets without requiring medical records to find the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages (tweets). For this purpose, we propose herein an intelligent model using traditional machine learning-based approaches, such as support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), naïve Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), and decision tree (DT) with the help of the term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to detect the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages. The proposed intelligent traditional machine learning-based model classifies Twitter messages into four categories, namely, confirmed deaths, recovered, and suspected. For the experimental analysis, the tweet data on the COVID-19 pandemic are analyzed to evaluate the results of traditional machine learning approaches. A benchmark dataset for COVID-19 on Twitter messages is developed and can be used for future research studies. The experiments show that the results of the proposed approach are promising in detecting the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages with overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score between 70% and 80% and the confusion matrix for machine learning approaches (i.e., SVM, NB, LR, RF, and DT) with the TF-IDF feature extraction technique. © This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.