Generalized Pandemic Model with COVID-19 for Early-Stage Infection Forecasting

Abstract

In this paper, we tackle the problem of forecasting future pandemics by training models with a COVID-19 time series. We tested this approach by producing one model and using it to forecast a non-trained time series; however, we limited this paper to the eight states with the highest population density in Mexico. We propose a generalized pandemic forecasting framework that transforms the time series into a dataset via three different transformations using random forest and backward transformations. Additionally, we tested the impact of the horizon and dataset window sizes for the training phase. A Wilcoxon test showed that the best transformation technique statistically outperformed the other two transformations with 100% certainty. The best transformation included the accumulated efforts of the other two plus a normalization that helped rescale the non-trained time series, improving the sMAPE from the value of 25.48 attained for the second-best transformation to 13.53. The figures in the experimentation section show promising results regarding the possibility of forecasting the early stages of future pandemics with trained data from the COVID-19 time series.