Dynamics and Development of the COVID-19 Epidemic in the United States: A Compartmental Model Enhanced With Deep Learning Techniques

BACKGROUND: Compartmental models dominate epidemic modeling. Transmission parameters between compartments are typically estimated through stochastic parameterization processes that depends on detailed statistics of transmission characteristics, which are economically and resource-wise expensive to collect. OBJECTIVE: We aim to apply deep learning techniques as a lower data dependency alternative to estimate transmission parameters of a customized compartmental model, for the purpose of simulating the dynamics of the US coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic and projecting its further development. METHODS: We constructed a compartmental model and developed a multistep deep learning methodology to estimate the model’s transmission parameters. We then fed the estimated transmission parameters to the model to predict development of the US COVID-19 epidemic for 35 and 42 days. Epidemics are considered suppressed when the basic reproduction number (R(0)) is less than 1. RESULTS: The deep learning–enhanced compartmental model predicts that R(0) will fall to <1 around August 17-19, 2020, at which point the epidemic will effectively start to die out, and that the US “infected” population will peak around August 16-18, 2020, at 3,228,574 to 3,308,911 individual cases. The model also predicted that the number of accumulative confirmed cases will cross the 5 million mark around August 7, 2020. CONCLUSIONS: Current compartmental models require stochastic parameterization to estimate the transmission parameters. These models’ effectiveness depends upon detailed statistics on transmission characteristics. As an alternative, deep learning techniques are effective in estimating these stochastic parameters with greatly reduced dependency on data particularity.