Forecasting the Spread of COVID-19 Using Deep Learning and Big Data Analytics Methods

To contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need for cutting-edge approaches that make use of existing technology capabilities. Forecasting its spread in a single or multiple countries ahead of time is a common strategy in most research. There is, however, a need for all-inclusive studies that capitalize on the entire regions on the African continent. This study closes this gap by conducting a wide-ranging investigation and analysis to forecast COVID-19 cases and identify the most critical countries in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic in all five major African regions. The proposed approach leveraged both statistical and deep learning models that included the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model with a seasonal perspective, the long-term memory (LSTM), and Prophet models. In this approach, the forecasting problem was considered as a univariate time series problem using confirmed cumulative COVID-19 cases. The model performance was evaluated using seven performance metrics that included the mean-squared error, root mean-square error, mean absolute percentage error, symmetric mean absolute percentage error, peak signal-to-noise ratio, normalized root mean-square error, and the R2 score. The best-performing model was selected and used to make future predictions for the next 61 days. In this study, the long short-term memory model performed the best. Mali, Angola, Egypt, Somalia, and Gabon from the Western, Southern, Northern, Eastern, and Central African regions, with an expected increase of 22.77%, 18.97%, 11.83%, 10.72%, and 2.81%, respectively, were the most vulnerable countries with the highest expected increase in the number of cumulative positive cases.