A Novel Machine Learning-Assisted Policy Recommendation Method on COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign

ABSTRACT

As the most serious global infectious disease in the past 100 years, it has caused severe loss of life and property to countries and their people worldwide in the past year. As the most powerful tool in the fight against the epidemic, how to quickly promote the COVID-19 vaccine administration plays a vital role in gradually establishing an immune barrier in the population as soon as possible and blocking the COVID-19 epidemic. In this paper, we provide a machine learning-based policy recommendation method on the vaccination campaign of COVID-19 by minimizing three different cost factors the duration of the pandemic, the budget of the COVID-19 battle as well as the death toll. To generate a more efficient vaccination policy, we construct an Age-stratified Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (ASSIR) model. We validate our method based on the real-world dataset of India by comparing our simulated results with the government's vaccination plan from machine learning prediction. Our approach shows a 13% decrease in disease control time and government budget. At the same time, we find out that vaccination based on each province's population leads to a 12.4% decrease in the death toll than on infection cases. The model developed in this study has practical implications for COVID-19 vaccination campaigns and the infection control of other infectious diseases. © 2021 IEEE.