Forecasting Covid-19 Transmission with ARIMA and LSTM Techniques in Morocco

In this paper, we are interested to forecast and predict the time evolution of the Covid-19 in Morocco based on two different time series forecasting models. We used Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Long short-term memory (LSTM) models to predict the outbreak of Covid-19 in the upcoming 2 months in Morocco. In this work, we measured the effective reproduction number using the real data and also the fitted forecasted data produced by the two used approaches, to reveal how effective the measures taken by the Moroccan government have been controlling the Covid-19 outbreak. The prediction results for the next 2 months show a strong evolution in the number of confirmed and death cases in Morocco. According to the measures of the effective reproduction number, the transmissibility of the disease will continue to expand in the next 2 months, but fortunately, the higher value of the effective reproduction number is not considered to be dramatic and, therefore, may give hope for controlling the disease.