Time series forecasting of new cases and new deaths rate for COVID-19 using deep learning methods.

The first known case of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was identified in December 2019. It has spread worldwide, leading to an ongoing pandemic, imposed restrictions and costs to many countries. Predicting the number of new cases and deaths during this period can be a useful step in predicting the costs and facilities required in the future. The purpose of this study is to predict new cases and deaths rate one, three and seven-day ahead during the next 100 days. The motivation for predicting every n days (instead of just every day) is the investigation of the possibility of computational cost reduction and still achieving reasonable performance. Such a scenario may be encountered in real-time forecasting of time series. Six different deep learning methods are examined on the data adopted from the WHO website. Three methods are LSTM, Convolutional LSTM, and GRU. The bidirectional extension is then considered for each method to forecast the rate of new cases and new deaths in Australia and Iran countries. This study is novel as it carries out a comprehensive evaluation of the aforementioned three deep learning methods and their bidirectional extensions to perform prediction on COVID-19 new cases and new death rate time series. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Bi-GRU and Bi-Conv-LSTM models are used for prediction on COVID-19 new cases and new deaths time series. The evaluation of the methods is presented in the form of graphs and Friedman statistical test. The results show that the bidirectional models have lower errors than other models. A several error evaluation metrics are presented to compare all models, and finally, the superiority of bidirectional methods is determined. This research could be useful for organisations working against COVID-19 and determining their long-term plans.

Impact of Covid-19 pandemic on electricity demand in the UK based on multivariate time series forecasting with Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory.

Due to lockdown measures taken by the UK government during the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the national electricity demand profile presented a notably different performance. The Coronavirus disease 2019 crisis has provided a unique opportunity to investigate how such a landscape-scale lockdown can influence the national electricity system. However, the impacts of social and economic restrictions on daily electricity demands are still poorly understood. This paper investigated how the UK-wide electricity demand was influenced during the Coronavirus disease 2019 crisis based on multivariate time series forecasting with Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory, to comprehend its correlations with containment measures, weather conditions, and renewable energy supplies. A deep-learning-based predictive model was established for daily electricity demand time series forecasting, which was trained by multiple features, including the number of coronavirus tests (smoothed), wind speed, ambient temperature, biomass, solar & wind power supplies, and historical electricity demand. Besides, the effects of Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on the Net-Zero target of 2050 were also studied through an interlinked approach.