Outbreak Prediction of COVID-19 for Dense and Populated Countries Using Machine Learning

The Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic persists to have a mortifying impact on the health and well-being of the global population. A continued rise in the number of patients testing positive for COVID-19 has created a lot of stress on governing bodies across the globe and they are finding it difficult to tackle the situation. We have developed an outbreak prediction system for COVID-19 for the top 10 highly and densely populated countries. The proposed prediction models forecast the count of new cases likely to arise for successive 5 days using 9 different machine learning algorithms. A set of models for predicting the rise in new cases, having an average accuracy of 87.9%  ± 3.9% was developed for 10 high population and high density countries. The highest accuracy of 99.93% was achieved for Ethiopia using Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) averaged over the next 5 days. The proposed prediction models used by us can help stakeholders to be prepared in advance for any sudden rise in outbreak to ensure optimal management of available resources.