The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has significantly spread over the world and comes up with new challenges to the research community. Although governments imposing numerous containment and social distancing measures, the need for the healthcare systems has dramatically increased and the effective management of infected patients becomes a challenging problem for hospitals. Thus, accurate short-term forecasting of the number of new contaminated and recovered cases is crucial for optimizing the available resources and arresting or slowing down the progression of such diseases. Recently, deep learning models demonstrated important improvements when handling time-series data in different applications. This paper presents a comparative study of five deep learning methods to forecast the number of new cases and recovered cases. Specifically, simple Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long short-term memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Gated recurrent units (GRUs) and Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) algorithms have been applied for global forecasting of COVID-19 cases based on a small volume of data. This study is based on daily confirmed and recovered cases collected from six countries namely Italy, Spain, France, China, USA, and Australia. Results demonstrate the promising potential of the deep learning model in forecasting COVID-19 cases and highlight the superior performance of the VAE compared to the other algorithms.

Deep learning methods for forecasting COVID-19 time-Series data: A Comparative study

COVID-19 is a pandemic that has affected over 170 countries around the world. The number of infected and deceased patients has been increasing at an alarming rate in almost all the affected nations. Forecasting techniques can be inculcated thereby assisting in designing better strategies and in taking productive decisions. These techniques assess the situations of the past thereby enabling better predictions about the situation to occur in the future. These predictions might help to prepare against possible threats and consequences. Forecasting techniques play a very important role in yielding accurate predictions. This study categorizes forecasting techniques into two types, namely, stochastic theory mathematical models and data science/machine learning techniques. Data collected from various platforms also play a vital role in forecasting. In this study, two categories of datasets have been discussed, i.e., big data accessed from World Health Organization/National databases and data from a social media communication. Forecasting of a pandemic can be done based on various parameters such as the impact of environmental factors, incubation period, the impact of quarantine, age, gender and many more. These techniques and parameters used for forecasting are extensively studied in this work. However, forecasting techniques come with their own set of challenges (technical and generic). This study discusses these challenges and also provides a set of recommendations for the people who are currently fighting the global COVID-19 pandemic.

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Forecasting Models for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19): A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

The catastrophic outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) also known as COVID-2019 has brought the worldwide threat to the living society. The whole world is putting incredible efforts to fight against the spread of this deadly disease in terms of infrastructure, finance, data sources, protective gears, life-risk treatments and several other resources. The artificial intelligence researchers are focusing their expertise knowledge to develop mathematical models for analyzing this epidemic situation using nationwide shared data. To contribute towards the well-being of living society, this article proposes to utilize the machine learning and deep learning models with the aim for understanding its everyday exponential behaviour along with the prediction of future reachability of the COVID-2019 across the nations by utilizing the real-time information from the Johns Hopkins dashboard.

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COVID-19 Epidemic Analysis using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms

Currently, novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a big threat to global health. The rapid spread of the virus has created pandemic, and countries all over the world are struggling with a surge in COVID-19 infected cases. There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19: information on the disease is very limited and scattered even if it exists. This motivates the use of data integration, combining data from diverse sources and eliciting useful information with a unified view of them. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian hierarchical model that integrates global data for real-time prediction of infection trajectory for multiple countries. Because the proposed model takes advantage of borrowing information across multiple countries, it outperforms an existing individual country-based model. As fully Bayesian way has been adopted, the model provides a powerful predictive tool endowed with uncertainty quantification. Additionally, a joint variable selection technique has been integrated into the proposed modeling scheme, which aimed to identify possible country-level risk factors for severe disease due to COVID-19.

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Estimation of COVID-19 spread curves integrating global data and borrowing information

IoMT amid COVID-19 pandemic: Application, architecture, technology, and security

In December 2019, a novel coronavirus was found in a seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, China. WHO officially named this coronavirus as COVID-19. Since the first patient was hospitalized on December 12, 2019, China has reported a total of 78,824 confirmed CONID-19 cases and 2,788 deaths as of February 28, 2020. Wuhan's cumulative confirmed cases and deaths accounted for 61.1% and 76.5% of the whole China mainland , making it the priority center for epidemic prevention and control. Meanwhile, 51 countries and regions outside China have reported 4,879 confirmed cases and 79 deaths as of February 28, 2020. COVID-19 epidemic does great harm to people's daily life and country's economic development. This paper adopts three kinds of mathematical models, i.e., Logistic model, Bertalanffy model and Gompertz model. The epidemic trends of SARS were first fitted and analyzed in order to prove the validity of the existing mathematical models. The results were then used to fit and analyze the situation of COVID-19. The prediction results of three different mathematical models are different for different parameters and in different regions. In general, the fitting effect of Logistic model may be the best among the three models studied in this paper, while the fitting effect of Gompertz model may be better than Bertalanffy model. According to the current trend, based on the three models, the total number of people expected to be infected is 49852-57447 in Wuhan,12972-13405 in non-Hubei areas and 80261-85140 in China respectively. The total death toll is 2502-5108 in Wuhan, 107-125 in Non-Hubei areas and 3150-6286 in China respetively. COVID-19 will be over p robably in late-April, 2020 in Wuhan and before late-March, 2020 in other areas respectively.

Prediction and analysis of Coronavirus Disease 2019

\n Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) are widely used in many industries. The voltage and output power of TEG chips are critical indicators to evaluate the performance of TEGs. The conventional method is to directly test the output voltage and power of the whole TEG chip that contains 127 pairs of P- and N-type (PN) legs (127-PN-TEG). However, the assembling of these PN legs is very time-consuming. In order to reduce experimental time and the consumption of TEG materials, we proposed an experimental method. We developed the test apparatus for the rapid evaluation of TEG performance using a TEG chip with a single pair of PN legs (1-PN-TEG). We made several 1-PN-TEGs and 127-PN-TEGs using the same thermoelectric material (bismuth telluride). We then measured the voltage and the power of these 1-PN-TEGs and 127-PN-TEGs, respectively. The experimental results were compared and analyzed. The comparison showed that the voltage of 127-PN-TEG is equal to the voltage of 1-PN-TEG times 127, which implies that we could use the test data of 1-PN-TEG to evaluate the performance of 127-PN-TEG. Using the experimental device developed in this paper, we also studied the effects of the PN leg area (cross-sectional area of PN legs) and the pressure applied over the TEGs on the output power of 1-PN-TEG. The experimental results showed that the power per unit area decreases with an increase in the 1-PN-TEG's PN leg area when the temperature difference between the hot and cold sides was constant. Under specific temperature difference conditions, the open-circuit voltage and the output power will increase with the pressure applied on the TEG chips.

Kewen Li

Papers

Prediction and analysis of Coronavirus Disease 2019

An Experimental Method for Fast Evaluating Thermoelectric Generators Using One Pair of P- and N-Type Legs