Modeling and forecasting the COVID-19 pandemic with heterogeneous autoregression approaches: South Korea

This paper deals with time series analysis for COVID-19 in South Korea. We adopt heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) time series models and discuss the statistical inference for various COVID-19 data. Seven data sets such as cumulative confirmed (CC) case, cumulative recovered (CR) case and cumulative death (CD) case as well as recovery rate, fatality rate and infection rates for 14 and 21 days are handled for the statistical analysis. In the HAR models, model selections of orders are conducted by evaluating root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) as well as $$ , AIC, and BIC. As a result of estimation, we provide coefficients estimates, standard errors and 95% confidence intervals in the HAR models. Our results report that fitted values via the HAR models are not only well-matched with the real cumulative cases but also differenced values from the fitted HAR models are well-matched with real daily cases. Additionally, because the CC and the CD cases are strongly correlated, we use a bivariate HAR model for the two data sets. Out-of-sample forecastings are carried out with the COVID-19 data sets to obtain multi-step ahead predicted values and 95% prediction intervals. As for the forecasting performances, four accuracy measures such as RMSE, MAE, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root relative square error (RRSE) are evaluated. Contributions of this work are three folds: First, it is shown that the HAR models fit well to cumulative numbers of the COVID-19 data along with good criterion results. Second, a variety of analysis are studied for the COVID-19 series: confirmed, recovered, death cases, as well as the related rates. Third, forecast accuracy measures are evaluated as small values of errors, and thus it is concluded that the HAR model provides a good prediction model for the COVID-19.