Forecasting adversities of COVID-19 waves in India using intelligent computing

The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic outburst triggered enormously all over India. This ill-fated and fatal brawl affected millions of Indian citizens, with many active and infected Indians struggling to recover from this deadly disease to date, leading to a grief situation. The present situation warrants developing a robust and sound forecasting model to evaluate the adversities of the epidemic with reasonable accuracy to assist officials in curbing this hazard. Consequently, we employed Auto-ARIMA, Auto-ETS, Auto-MLP, Auto-ELM, AM, MLP and proposed ELM methods for assessing accumulative infected COVID-19 individuals by the end of July 2021. We made 90 days of advanced forecasting, i.e., up to 24 July 2021, for the number of cumulative infected COVID-19 cases of India using all seven methods in 15 days’ intervals. We fine-tuned the hyper-parameters to enhance the prediction performance of these models and observed that the proposed ELM model offers satisfactory accuracy with MAPE of 5.01, and it rendered better accuracy than the other six models. To comprehend the dataset's nature, five features are extracted. The resulting feature values encouraged further investigation of the models for an updated dataset, where the proposed model provides encouraging results.