Internationale Zeitschrift für öffentliche Gesundheit und Sicherheit

Modeling and Forecasting the Global Daily Incidence of Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19): An Application of Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) Model

Abstract

Amare Wubishet Ayele, Mulugeta Aklilu Zewdie and Tizazu Bayko

Background: Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) is a public health epidemic outbreak and is currently a concern of the international community. As of 23 March 2020, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 has reached more than 300,000 worldwide. This burden crates high stress in the global community, and is having a significant impact on the global economy. This paper pursued to obtain a time series model that able to model and forecast the global daily incidence of Novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Methods: Global daily number of confirmed cases and deaths from Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) reported during the study period from 22 January 2020 to 22 March 2020 were considered. A time series model namely an Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) Model was employed to model and forecast the daily global incidence of COVID-19. Various ARMA models were considered with different lag order specification, and the best model was considered using the Akaike's information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC).

Results: A dramatic rise in the number of confirmed cases and deaths per day from COVID-19 was observed around the globe during the study period. In the analysis, the log-transformed value of the series was considered, and relatively stable variations were found around the mean of the series. The ARMA (2, 3) and ARMA (2, 2) model for the daily reported death and confirmed cases series were obtained as a best model respectively. The incidence of death from COVID-19 is substantially impacted by the past two AR lags (AR(1)= 0.208 and AR(2)=0.68 ) and the past three shocks/MA (MA(1)=0.899, MA(2)=0.397, and MA(3)=0.449,).

Conclusions: The global incidence of Novel Corona virus (COVID-19) has risen significantly over the study period and needs to be strongly underscored. The forecast value shows a dramatic rise in the incidence of COVID-19 for the next 2 months. This study warns the body concerned to the need for a high degree of action to prevent the spread of coronavirus with possible intervention. The prevention strategies that help to curb the virus identified by world health organization (WHO) should be implemented basically in the global community with optimal resource utilization.