A novel transfer deep learning model with reinforcement-learning-based hyperparameter optimization for short-term load forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has significantly impacted the world. The sudden decline in electricity load demand caused by strict social distancing restrictions has made it difficult for traditional models to forecast the load demand during the pandemic. Therefore, in this study, a novel transfer deep learning model with reinforcement-learning-based hyperparameter optimization is proposed for short-term load forecasting during the pandemic. First, a knowledge base containing mobility data is constructed, which can reflect the changes in visitor volume in different regions and buildings based on mobile services. Therefore, the sudden decline in load can be analyzed according to the socioeconomic behavior changes during the pandemic. Furthermore, a new transfer deep learning model is proposed to address the problem of limited mobility data associated with the pandemic. Moreover, reinforcement learning is employed to optimize the hyperparameters of the proposed model automatically, which avoids the manual adjustment of the hyperparameters, thereby maximizing the forecasting accuracy. To enhance the hyperparameter optimization efficiency of the reinforcement-learning agents, a new advance forecasting method is proposed to forecast the state-action values of the state space that have not been traversed. The experimental results on 12 real-world datasets covering different countries and cities demonstrate that the proposed model achieves high forecasting accuracy during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. © 2022 - IOS Press. All rights reserved.

Automatic Prognosis of COVID-19 from CT Scan using Super-convergence CNN Algorithm

Due to the high incident rate of the novel corona virus popularly known as COVID-19, the number of suspected patients needing diagnosis presents overwhelming pressure on hospital and health management systems. This has led to global pandemic and eventual lockdown in many countries. More so, the infected patients present a higher risk of infecting the healthcare workers. This is because once a patient is positive of the virus, the recovery progress or deterioration needs to be monitored by medical experts and other health workers, which eventually exposes them to the infection. In this paper, we present an automatic prognosis of COVID-19 from a computed tomography (CT) scan using deep convolution neural networks (CNN). The models were trained using a super-convergence discriminative fine-tuning algorithm, which uses a layer-specific learning rate to fine-tune a deep CNN model;this learning rate is increased or decreased per iteration to avoid the saddle-point problem and achieve the best performance within few training epochs. The best performance results of our model were obtained as 98.57% accuracy, 98.59% precision and 98.55% recall rate. This work is therefore, presented to aid radiologist to safely and conveniently monitor the recovery of infected patients. © 2021 IEEE.