Autoregressive count data modeling on mobility patterns to predict cases of COVID-19 infection

At the beginning of 2022 the global daily count of new cases of COVID-19 exceeded 3.2 million, a tripling of the historical peak value reported between the initial outbreak of the pandemic and the end of 2021. Aerosol transmission through interpersonal contact is the main cause of the disease’s spread, although control measures have been put in place to reduce contact opportunities. Mobility pattern is a basic mechanism for understanding how people gather at a location and how long they stay there. Due to the inherent dependencies in disease transmission, models for associating mobility data with confirmed cases need to be individually designed for different regions and time periods. In this paper, we propose an autoregressive count data model under the framework of a generalized linear model to illustrate a process of model specification and selection. By evaluating a 14-day-ahead prediction from Sweden, the results showed that for a dense population region, using mobility data with a lag of 8 days is the most reliable way of predicting the number of confirmed cases in relative numbers at a high coverage rate. It is sufficient for both of the autoregressive terms, studied variable and conditional expectation, to take one day back. For sparsely populated regions, a lag of 10 days produced the lowest error in absolute value for the predictions, where weekly periodicity on the studied variable is recommended for use. Interventions were further included to identify the most relevant mobility categories. Statistical features were also presented to verify the model assumptions.