ABSTRACT
Accurate prediction of cumulative COVID-19 infected cases is essential for effectively managing the limited healthcare resources in India. Historically, epidemiological models have helped in controlling such epidemics. Models require accurate historical data to predict future outcomes. In our data, there were days exhibiting erratic, apparently anomalous jumps and drops in the number of daily reported COVID-19 infected cases that did not conform with the overall trend. Including those observations in the training data would most likely worsen model predictive accuracy. However, with existing epidemiological models it is not straightforward to determine, for a specific day, whether or not an outcome should be considered anomalous. In this work, we propose an algorithm to automatically identify anomalous 'jump' and 'drop' days, and then based upon the overall trend, the number of daily infected cases for those days is adjusted and the training data is amended using the adjusted observations. We applied the algorithm in conjunction with a recently proposed, modified Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model to demonstrate that prediction accuracy is improved after adjusting training data counts for apparent erratic anomalous jumps and drops.
