A novel approach for COVID-19 Infection forecasting based on multi-source deep transfer learning

COVID-19 is a contagious disease; so, predicting its future infections in a provincial region requires the consideration of the related data (i.e., rates of infection, mortality and recovery, etc.) over a period of time. Clearly, the COVID-19 data of a particular provincial region can be easily modelled as a time-series. However, predicting the future COVID-19 infections in a particular region is quite challenging when the availability of COVID-19 dataset of the province is of little quantity. Accordingly, ML models when deployed for such tasks usually results in low infection prediction accuracy. To overcome such issues of low variance and high bias in a model due to data scarcity, multi-source transfer learning (MSTL) along with deep learning may be quite useful and effective. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel technique based on multi-source deep transfer learning (MSDTL) to efficiently forecast the future COVID-19 infections in the provinces with insufficient COVID-19 data. The proposed approach is a novel contribution as it considers the fact that future COVID-19 transmission in a region also depends on its population density and economic conditions (GDP) for accurate forecasting of the infections to tackle the pandemic efficiently. The importance of this feature selection is experimentally proved in this paper. Our proposed approach employs the well-known recurrent neural network architecture, the Long-short term memory (LSTM), a popular deep-learning model for history-dependent tasks. A comparative analysis has been performed with existing state-of-art algorithms to portray the efficiency of LSTM. Thus, formation of MSDTL approach enhances the predictive precision capability of the LSTM. We evaluate the proposed methodology over the COVID-19 dataset from sixty-two provinces belonging to different nations. We then empirically evaluate the performance of the proposed approach using two different evaluation metrics, viz. The mean absolute percentage error and the coefficient of determination. We show that our proposed MSDTL based approach is better in terms of the accuracy of the future infection prediction, and produces improvements up to 96% over its without-TL counterpart.