Short-term forecasting COVID-19 cumulative confirmed cases: Perspectives for Brazil
Autor
Dal Molin Ribeiro, Matheus Henrique
Silva, Ramon Gomes da
Mariani, Viviana Cocco
Santos Coelho, Leandro dos
Institución
Resumen
The new Coronavirus (COVID-19) is an emerging disease responsible for infecting millions of people since
the first notification until nowadays. Developing efficient short-term forecasting models allow forecasting the number of future cases. In this context, it is possible to develop strategic planning in the public health system to avoid deaths. In this paper, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), cubist regression (CUBIST), random forest (RF), ridge regression (RIDGE), support vector regression (SVR),
and stacking-ensemble learning are evaluated in the task of time series forecasting with one, three, and
six-days ahead the COVID-19 cumulative confirmed cases in ten Brazilian states with a high daily incidence. In the stacking-ensemble learning approach, the CUBIST regression, RF, RIDGE, and SVR models are
adopted as base-learners and Gaussian process (GP) as meta-learner. The models’ effectiveness is evaluated based on the improvement index, mean absolute error, and symmetric mean absolute percentage
error criteria. In most of the cases, the SVR and stacking-ensemble learning reach a better performance
regarding adopted criteria than compared models. In general, the developed models can generate accurate forecasting, achieving errors in a range of 0.87%–3.51%, 1.02%–5.63%, and 0.95%–6.90% in one, three,
and six-days-ahead, respectively. The ranking of models, from the best to the worst regarding accuracy, in
all scenarios is SVR, stacking-ensemble learning, ARIMA, CUBIST, RIDGE, and RF models. The use of evaluated models is recommended to forecasting and monitor the ongoing growth of COVID-19 cases, once
these models can assist the managers in the decision-making support systems.