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Forecasting COVID-19 confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries: Revisiting established time series modeling through novel applications for the USA and Italy

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  • Emrah Gecili
  • Assem Ziady
  • Rhonda D Szczesniak

Abstract

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is an emergent disease that initially had no historical data to guide scientists on predicting/ forecasting its global or national impact over time. The ability to predict the progress of this pandemic has been crucial for decision making aimed at fighting this pandemic and controlling its spread. In this work we considered four different statistical/time series models that are readily available from the ‘forecast’ package in R. We performed novel applications with these models, forecasting the number of infected cases (confirmed cases and similarly the number of deaths and recovery) along with the corresponding 90% prediction interval to estimate uncertainty around pointwise forecasts. Since the future may not repeat the past for this pandemic, no prediction model is certain. However, any prediction tool with acceptable prediction performance (or prediction error) could still be very useful for public-health planning to handle spread of the pandemic, and could policy decision-making and facilitate transition to normality. These four models were applied to publicly available data of the COVID-19 pandemic for both the USA and Italy. We observed that all models reasonably predicted the future numbers of confirmed cases, deaths, and recoveries of COVID-19. However, for the majority of the analyses, the time series model with autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and cubic smoothing spline models both had smaller prediction errors and narrower prediction intervals, compared to the Holt and Trigonometric Exponential smoothing state space model with Box-Cox transformation (TBATS) models. Therefore, the former two models were preferable to the latter models. Given similarities in performance of the models in the USA and Italy, the corresponding prediction tools can be applied to other countries grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, and to any pandemics that can occur in future.

Suggested Citation

  • Emrah Gecili & Assem Ziady & Rhonda D Szczesniak, 2021. "Forecasting COVID-19 confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries: Revisiting established time series modeling through novel applications for the USA and Italy," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(1), pages 1-11, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0244173
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0244173
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Fotios Petropoulos & Spyros Makridakis, 2020. "Forecasting the novel coronavirus COVID-19," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(3), pages 1-8, March.
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    Cited by:

    1. Pleños, Mary Cris F., 2022. "Time Series Forecasting Using Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing: Application to Abaca Fiber Data," Problems of World Agriculture / Problemy Rolnictwa Światowego, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, vol. 22(2), June.
    2. Peter Congdon, 2022. "A spatio-temporal autoregressive model for monitoring and predicting COVID infection rates," Journal of Geographical Systems, Springer, vol. 24(4), pages 583-610, October.
    3. Isra Al-Turaiki & Fahad Almutlaq & Hend Alrasheed & Norah Alballa, 2021. "Empirical Evaluation of Alternative Time-Series Models for COVID-19 Forecasting in Saudi Arabia," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(16), pages 1-19, August.

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