Time Series Forecasting of New Cases and New Deaths Rate for COVID-19 using Deep Learning Methods

Covid-19 has been started in the year 2019 and imposed restrictions in many countries and costs organisations and governments. Predicting the number of new cases and deaths during this period can be a useful step in predicting the costs and facilities required in the future. The purpose of this study is to predict new cases and death rate for seven days ahead. Deep learning methods and statistical analysis model these predictions for 100 days. Six different deep learning methods are examined for the data adopted from the WHO website. Three methods are known as LSTM, Convolutional LSTM, and GRU. The bi-directional mode is then considered for each method to forecast the rate of new cases and new deaths for Australia and Iran countries. This study is novel as it attempts to implement the mentioned three deep learning methods, along with their Bi-directional models, to predict COVID-19 new cases and new death rate time series. All methods are compared, and results are presented. The results are examined in the form of graphs and statistical analyses. The results show that the Bi-directional models have lower error than other models. Several error evaluation metrics are presented to compare all models, and finally, the superiority of Bi-directional methods are determined. The experimental results and statistical test show on datasets to compare the proposed method with other baseline methods. This research could be useful for organisations working against COVID-19 and determining their long-term plans.