A Modified Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-Based Time Series Prediction of COVID-19 Cases from Multi-Country Data

The deadly Corona virus that first appeared in a seafood market in the Wuhan city of China in December 2019 has been causing global distress by claiming lives and collapsing economies. Given its serious nature, there is an urgent need to understand the virus’s future trajectory. The current study predicts the next day confirmed, death and recovery cases of COVID-19 pandemic for India, Italy, Spain, and the USA by using a modified multilayer neural network (MMLNN) model. The spread of the COVID-19 data is collected from the Kaggle website for the period of 22nd January 2020 to 20th April 2020 (i.e., for 90 days). The predicted figures of the spread of the disease have been estimated and compared with the actual values. Higher precision of the estimates has been observed from the MMLNN model compared to the conventional multilayer neural network (MLANN) model. Specifically, the MMLNN model does faster and more efficient training of the data resulting in less error. The paper forecasts the next day figures (i.e., for 21st April) for all the three cases and does the comparison of the results with the actual values reported. A deviation of 6% is obtained for India, and for the other three countries the deviation is below 3.5%. Given the high accuracy predictive power, the authors recommend that the MMLNN model can be integrated into the health policy of the countries that are struggling with the spread of the virus. Specifically, a decision on health policies such as restrictions on movement can be based on the short-range predictions of the spread of the virus infection.