Abstract The early detection of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak is important to save people’s lives and restart the economy quickly and safely. People’s social behavior, reflected in their mobility data, plays a major role in spreading the disease. Therefore, we used the daily mobility data aggregated at the county level beside COVID-19 statistics and demographic information for short-term forecasting of COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States. The daily data are fed to a deep learning model based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to predict the accumulated number of COVID-19 cases in the next two weeks. A significant average correlation was achieved ( r =0.83 ( p = 0.005 )) between the model predicted and actual accumulated cases in the interval from August 1, 2020 until January 22, 2021. The model predictions had r > 0.7 for 87% of the counties across the United States. A lower correlation was reported for the counties with total cases of <1000 during the test interval. The average mean absolute error (MAE) was 605.4 and decreased with a decrease in the total number of cases during the testing interval. The model was able to capture the effect of government responses on COVID-19 cases.more »
COUnty aggRegation mixup AuGmEntation (COURAGE) COVID-19 prediction
Abstract The global spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has casted a significant threat to mankind. As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, predicting localized disease severity is crucial for advanced resource allocation. This paper proposes a method named COURAGE (COUnty aggRegation mixup AuGmEntation) to generate a short-term prediction of 2-week-ahead COVID-19 related deaths for each county in the United States, leveraging modern deep learning techniques. Specifically, our method adopts a self-attention model from Natural Language Processing, known as the transformer model, to capture both short-term and long-term dependencies within the time series while enjoying computational efficiency. Our model solely utilizes publicly available information for COVID-19 related confirmed cases, deaths, community mobility trends and demographic information, and can produce state-level predictions as an aggregation of the corresponding county-level predictions. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance among the publicly available benchmark models.
- Award ID(s):
- 1717916
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10314814
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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