Time series analysis of COVID-19 cases

Abstract

Purpose

This study analyses the prevalent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic using machine learning algorithms. The data set used is an API data provided by the John Hopkins University resource centre and used the Web crawler to gather all the data features such as confirmed, recovered and death cases. Because of the unavailability of any COVID-19 drug at the moment, the unvarnished truth is that this outbreak is not expected to end in the near future, so the number of cases of this study would be very date specific. The analysis demonstrated in this paper focuses on the monthly analysis of confirmed, recovered and death cases, which assists to identify the trend and seasonality in the data. The purpose of this study is to explore the essential concepts of time series algorithms and use those concepts to perform time series analysis on the infected cases worldwide and forecast the spread of the virus in the next two weeks and thus aid in health-care services. Lower obtained mean absolute percentage error results of the forecasting time interval validate the model’s credibility.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, the time series analysis of this outbreak forecast was done using the auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and also seasonal auto-regressive integrated moving averages with exogenous regressor (SARIMAX) and optimized to achieve better results.

Findings

The inferences of time series forecasting models ARIMA and SARIMAX were efficient to produce exact approximate results. The forecasting results indicate that an increasing trend is observed and there is a high rise in COVID-19 cases in many regions and countries that might face one of its worst days unless and until measures are taken to curb the spread of this disease quickly. The pattern of the rise of the spread of the virus in such countries is exactly mimicking some of the countries of early COVID-19 adoption such as Italy and the USA. Further, the obtained numbers of the models are date specific so the most recent execution of the model would return more recent results. The future scope of the study involves analysis with other models such as long short-term memory and then comparison with time series models.

Originality/value

A time series is a time-stamped data set in which each data point corresponds to a set of observations made at a particular time instance. This work is novel and addresses the COVID-19 with the help of time series analysis. The inferences of time series forecasting models ARIMA and SARIMAX were efficient to produce exact approximate results.

Citation

Bhangu, K.S., Sandhu, J.K. and Sapra, L. (2022), "Time series analysis of COVID-19 cases", World Journal of Engineering, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 40-48. https://doi.org/10.1108/WJE-09-2020-0431