A Study for Plausible Third Wave of COVID-19 in India through Fuzzy Time Series Modelling Based on Particle Swarm Optimization and Fuzzy c-Means

The outbreak of COVID-19 has become a global pandemic as announced by World Health Organisation. As India has already met the two waves, named first and second wave, it is assumed that COVID-19 will again strike in India in the form of third wave. The peak during the upcoming third wave and determination of the approximated maximum number of COVID-19 infected cases and deaths at a particular day becomes crucial for India. To determine the peak of infectious curve, this article proposed a hybrid fuzzy time series forecasting model based on particle swarm optimization and fuzzy c-mean technique, named as fuzzy time series particle swarm optimization extended fuzzy c-mean technique. The proposed model works in two phases. In phase-I, particle swarm optimization extended fuzzy c-mean method is used to form initial intervals with the help of centroids, while in phase-II, these intervals are updated to form subintervals. In the present article, a fitness function is developed for particle swarm optimization to increase its convergence speed and basic fuzzy c-mean is extended by using an exponential function to tolerate the effect of outliers, named as extended fuzzy c-mean technique. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been tested based on mean square error and root mean square error on first and second wave COVID-19 data, and the obtained results are very close to the existing data of COVID-19 with less error rate. Thus, the proposed model is suitable to forecast a better approximation value of COVID-19 infected cases and deaths in India during the upcoming third wave. This study demonstrates that third wave of COVID-19 could occur in India, while also illustrating that it is unlikely for any such resurgence to be as large as the second wave. The proposed model predicts that the peak of third wave will occur approximately after 40–70 days from the mid of December. Furthermore, the impact of vaccination on infected cases and deaths during the upcoming third wave in India is also studied. With the implementation of the vaccine on the Indian people, the peak of COVID-19 infected during third wave will be shifted in forward direction. On the basis of the proposed model, government authorities will be enabling to know expected required resources such as hospital patient beds, ICU beds, and oxygen concentrators during the upcoming outspread of COVID-19 like disease in future.