ABSTRACT
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a public health problem once according to the World Health Organization up to June 24th, 2020, more than 9.1 million people were infected, and more than 470 thousand have died worldwide. In the current scenario, the Brazil and the United States of America present a high daily incidence of new cases and deaths. Therefore, it is important to forecast the number of new cases in a time window of one week, once this can help the public health system developing strategic planning to deals with the COVID-19. The application of the forecasting artificial intelligence (AI) models has the potential of deal with dynamical behavior of time-series like of COVID-19. In this paper, Bayesian regression neural network, cubist regression, k-nearest neighbors, quantile random forest, and support vector regression, are used stand-alone, and coupled with the recent pre-processing variational mode decomposition (VMD) employed to decompose the time series into several intrinsic mode functions. All AI techniques are evaluated in the task of time-series forecasting with one, three, and six-days-ahead the cumulative COVID-19 cases in five Brazilian and American states, with a high number of cases up to April 28th, 2020. Previous cumulative COVID-19 cases and exogenous variables as daily temperature and precipitation were employed as inputs for all forecasting models. The models' effectiveness are evaluated based on the performance criteria. In general, the hybridization of VMD outperformed single forecasting models regarding the accuracy, specifically when the horizon is six-days-ahead, the hybrid VMD-single models achieved better accuracy in 70% of the cases. Regarding the exogenous variables, the importance ranking as predictor variables is, from the upper to the lower, past cases, temperature, and precipitation. Therefore, due to the efficiency of evaluated models to forecasting cumulative COVID-19 cases up to six-days-ahead, the adopted models can be recommended as a promising models for forecasting and be used to assist in the development of public policies to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 outbreak.
ABSTRACT
The new Coronavirus (COVID-19) is an emerging disease responsible for infecting millions of people since the first notification until nowadays. Developing efficient short-term forecasting models allow forecasting the number of future cases. In this context, it is possible to develop strategic planning in the public health system to avoid deaths. In this paper, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), cubist regression (CUBIST), random forest (RF), ridge regression (RIDGE), support vector regression (SVR), and stacking-ensemble learning are evaluated in the task of time series forecasting with one, three, and six-days ahead the COVID-19 cumulative confirmed cases in ten Brazilian states with a high daily incidence. In the stacking-ensemble learning approach, the CUBIST regression, RF, RIDGE, and SVR models are adopted as base-learners and Gaussian process (GP) as meta-learner. The models' effectiveness is evaluated based on the improvement index, mean absolute error, and symmetric mean absolute percentage error criteria. In most of the cases, the SVR and stacking-ensemble learning reach a better performance regarding adopted criteria than compared models. In general, the developed models can generate accurate forecasting, achieving errors in a range of 0.87%-3.51%, 1.02%-5.63%, and 0.95%-6.90% in one, three, and six-days-ahead, respectively. The ranking of models, from the best to the worst regarding accuracy, in all scenarios is SVR, stacking-ensemble learning, ARIMA, CUBIST, RIDGE, and RF models. The use of evaluated models is recommended to forecasting and monitor the ongoing growth of COVID-19 cases, once these models can assist the managers in the decision-making support systems.