Baseline Accuracies of Forecasting COVID-19 Cases in Russian Regions on a Year in Retrospect Using Basic Statistical and Machine Learning Methods

The large amount of data accumulated so far on the dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak has allowed assessing the accuracy of forecasting methods in retrospect. This work compares several basic time series analysis methods, including machine learning methods, for forecasting the number of confirmed cases for some days ahead. Year-long data for all regions of Russia has been used from the Yandex DataLens platform. As a result, accuracy estimates for these basic methods have been obtained for Russian regions and Russia as a whole, in dependence on the forecasting horizon. The best basic models for forecasting for 14 days are exponential smoothing and ARIMA, with an error of 11–19% by the MAPE metric for the latest part of the course of the epidemic. The accuracies obtained can be considered as baselines for more complex prospective models.