VOC-DL: Deep learning prediction model for COVID-19 based on VOC virus variants

The ever-mutating COVID-19 has infected billions of people worldwide and seriously affected the stability of human society and the world economic development. Therefore, it is essential to make long-term and short-term forecasts for COVID-19. However, the pandemic situation in different countries and regions may be dominated by different virus variants, and the transmission capacity of different virus variants diversifies. Therefore, there is a need to develop a predictive model that can incorporate mutational information to make reasonable predictions about the current pandemic situation.

This paper proposes a deep learning prediction framework, VOC-DL, based on Variants Of Concern (VOC). The framework uses slope feature method to process the time series dataset containing VOC variant information, and uses VOC-LSTM, VOC-GRU and VOC-BILSTM prediction models included in the framework to predict the daily newly confirmed cases.

We analyzed daily newly confirmed cases in Italy, South Korea, Russia, Japan and India from April 14th, 2021 to July 3rd, 2021. The experimental results show that all VOC-DL models proposed in this paper can accurately predict the pandemic trend in the medium and long term, and VOC-LSTM model has the best prediction performance, with the highest average determination coefficient R2 of 96.83% in five nations' datasets. The overall prediction has robustness.

The experimental results show that VOC-LSTM is the best predictor for such a series of data and has higher prediction accuracy in the long run. At the same time, our VOC-DL framework combining VOC variants has reference significance for predicting other variants in the future.