Adversarial Training for Predicting the Trend of the COVID-19 Pandemic

It is significant to accurately predict the epidemic trend of COVID-19 due to its detrimental impact on the global health and economy. Although machine learning-based approaches have been applied to predict epidemic trend, standard models have shown low accuracy for long-term prediction due to a high level of uncertainty and lack of essential training data. This paper proposes an improved machine learning framework employing generative adversarial network (GAN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) for adversarial training to forecast the potential threat of COVID-19 in countries where COVID-19 is rapidly spreading. It also investigates the most updated COVID-19 epidemiological data before October 18, 2020 and models the epidemic trend as time series that can be fed into the proposed model for data augmentation and trend prediction of the epidemic. The model is trained to predict daily numbers of cumulative confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Italy, USA, China, Germany, UK, and across the world. The paper further analyzes and suggests which populations are at risk of contracting COVID-19.

Predicting the Epidemics Trend of COVID-19 Using Epidemiological-Based Generative Adversarial Networks

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory illness that can spread from person to person. Since the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading rapidly over the world and its outbreak has affected different people in different ways, it is significant to study or predict the evolution of its epidemic trend. However, most of the studies focused solely on either classical epidemiological models or machine learning models for COVID-19 pandemic forecasting, which either suffer from the limitation of the generalization ability and scalability or the lack of surveillance data. In this work, we propose T-SIRGAN that integrates the strengths of the epidemiological theories and deep learning models to be able to represent complex epidemic processes and model the non-linear relationship for more accurate prediction of the growth of COVID-19. T-SIRGAN first adopts the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model to generate epidemiological-based simulation data, which are then fed into a generative adversarial network (GAN) as adversarial examples for data augmentation. Then, Transformers are used to predict the future trends of COVID-19 based on the generated synthetic data. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. We also discuss the effectiveness of vaccine based on the difference between the predicted and the reported number of COVID-19 cases.