Early prediction of coronavirus disease epidemic severity in the contiguous United States based on deep learning

In November 2019, the coronavirus disease outbreak began, caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. In just over two months, the unprecedented rapid spread resulted in more than 10,000 confirmed cases worldwide. This study predicted the infectious spread of coronavirus disease in the contiguous United States using a convolutional autoencoder with long short-term memory and compared its predictive performance with that of the convolutional autoencoder without long short-term memory. The epidemic data were obtained from the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from January 1st to April 6th, 2020. We used data from the first 366,607 confirmed cases in the United States. In this study, the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were gridded by latitude and longitude and the grids were categorized into six epidemic levels based on the number of confirmed cases. The input of the convolutional autoencoder with long short-term memory was the distribution of confirmed cases 14 days before, whereas the output was the distribution of confirmed cases 7 days after the date of testing. The mean square error in this model was 1.664, the peak signal-to-noise ratio was 55.699, and the structural similarity index was 0.99, which were better than those of the corresponding results of the convolutional autoencoder. These results showed that the convolutional autoencoder with long short-term memory effectively and reliably predicted the spread of infectious disease in the contiguous United States.