A SSA-Based Attention-BiLSTM Model for COVID-19 Prediction

ABSTRACT

The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has widely spread over the world and comes up with new challenges to the research community. Accurately predicting the number of new infections is essential for optimizing available resources and slowing the progression of such diseases. Long short-term memory network (LSTM) is a typical method for COVID-19 prediction in deep learning, but it is difficult to extract potentially important features in time series effectively. Thus, we proposed a Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) model based on the attention mechanism (ATT) and used the Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA) for parameter tuning, to predict the daily new cases of COVID-19. We capture the information in the past and future through the BiLSTM network and apply the attention mechanism to assign different weights to the hidden state of BiLSTM, enhance the ability of the model to learn vital information, and use the SSA to optimize the critical parameters of the model for matching the characteristics of COVID-19 data, enhance the interpretability of the model parameters. This study is based on daily confirmed cases collected from six countries Egypt, Ireland, Iran, Japan, Russia, and the UK. The experimental results show that our proposed model has the best predictive performance among all the comparison models. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.