Artificial Neural Networks for COVID-19 Time Series Forecasting

Today, COVID-19 pandemic has become the greatest worldwide threat, as it spreads rapidly among individuals in most countries around the world. This study concerns the problem of daily prediction of new COVID-19 cases in Italy, aiming to find the best predictive model for daily infection number in countries with a large number of confirmed cases. Finding the most accurate forecasting model would help allocate medical resources, handle the spread of the pandemic and get more prepared in terms of health care systems. We compare the forecasting performance of linear and nonlinear forecasting models using daily COVID-19 data for the period between 22 February 2020 and 10 January 2022. We discuss various forecasting approaches, including an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, a Nonlinear Autoregressive Neural Network (NARNN) model, a TBATS model and Exponential Smoothing on the data collected from 22 February 2020 to 10 January 2022 and compared their accuracy using the data collected from 26 March 2020 to 04 April 2020, choosing the model with the lowest Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) value. Since the linear models seem not to easily follow the nonlinear patterns of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been successfully applied to solve problems of forecasting nonlinear models. The model has been used for daily prediction of COVID-19 cases for the next 20 days without any additional intervention. The prediction model can be applied to other countries struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic and to any possible future pandemics.