Prediction model for the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak in the global environment

• Main Authors: Ron S. Hirschprung, Chen Hajaj
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-07-01
• Series: Heliyon
• Subjects: COVID-19; Data mining; Decision support systems; Machine learning; Prediction methods
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402101519X

COVID-19 has long become a worldwide pandemic. It is responsible for the death of over two million people and posed an economic recession. This paper studies the spread pattern of COVID-19, aiming to establish a prediction model for this event. We harness Data Mining and Machine Learning methodologies to train regression models to predict the number of confirmed cases in a spatial-temporal space. We introduce an innovative concept ‒ the Center of Infection Mass (CoIM) ‒ adapted from the field of physics. We empirically evaluated our model on western European countries, based on the CoIM index and other features, and showed that a relatively high accurate prediction of the spread can be obtained. Our contribution is twofold: first, we introduced a prediction methodology and proved empirically that a prediction can be made even to the range of over a month; second, we showed promise in adopting the CoIM index to prediction models, when models that adopt the CoIM yield significantly better results than those that discard it. By applying our model, and better controlling the inherent tradeoff between life-saving and economy, we believe that decision-makers can take close to optimal measures. Thus, this methodology may contribute to public welfare.