Novel spatiotemporal feature extraction parallel deep neural network for forecasting confirmed cases of coronavirus disease 2019

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic continues as of March 26 and spread to Europe on approximately February 24. A report from April 29 revealed 1.26 million confirmed cases and 125 928 deaths in Europe. To refer government and enterprise to arrange countermeasures. The paper proposes a novel deep neural network framework to forecast the COVID-19 outbreak. The COVID-19Net framework combined 1D convolutional neural network, 2D convolutional neural network, and bidirectional gated recurrent units. COVID-19Net can well integrate the characteristics of time, space, and influencing factors of the COVID-19 accumulative cases. Three European countries with severe outbreaks were studied—Germany, Italy, and Spain—to extract spatiotemporal features and predict the number of confirmed cases. The prediction results acquired from COVID-19Net are compared to those obtained using a CNN, GRU, and CNN-GRU. The mean absolute error, mean absolute percentage error, and root mean square error, which is commonly used model assessment indices, were used to compare the accuracy of the models. The results verified that COVID-19Net was notably more accurate than the other models. The mean absolute percentage error generated by COVID-19Net was 1.447 for Germany, 1.801 for Italy, and 2.828 for Spain, which was considerably better than those of the other models. This indicated that the proposed framework could accurately predict the accumulated number of confirmed cases in the three countries and serve as an essential reference for devising public health strategies. And also indicated that COVID-19 has high spatiotemporal relations, it suggests us to keep a social distance and avoid unnecessary trips.