Forecasting COVID19 Reliability of the Countries by Using Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process Models

Reliability is the probability that a system or a product fulfills its intended function without failure over a period of time and it is generally used to determine the reliability, release and testing stop time of the system. The primary objective of this study is to predict and forecast COVID19 reliabilities of the countries by utilizing this definition of the reliability. To our knowledge, this study is the first carried out in the direction of this objective. The major contribution of this study is to model the COVID19 data by considering the intensity functions with different types of functional shapes, including geometric, exponential, Weibull, gamma and identifying best fit (BF) model for each country, separately. To achieve the objective determined, cumulative number of confirmed cases are modelled by eight Non-Homogenous Poisson Process (NHPP) models. BF models are selected based on three comparison criteria, including Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE), and Theil Statistics (TS). The results can be summarized as follows: S-shaped models provide better fit for 56 of 70 countries. Current outbreak may continue in 43 countries and a new outbreak may occur in 27 countries. 50 countries have the reliability smaller than 75%, 9 countries between 75% and 90%, and 11 countries a 90% or higher on 11 August 2021. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00354-022-00183-1.