COVID-19 outbreak prediction using Seq2Seq + Attention and Word2Vec keyword time series data

PLoS One. 2023 Apr 26;18(4):e0284298. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284298. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

As of 2022, COVID-19, first reported in Wuhan, China, in November 2019, has become a worldwide epidemic, causing numerous infections and casualties and enormous social and economic damage. To mitigate its impact, various COVID-19 prediction studies have emerged, most of them using mathematical models and artificial intelligence for prediction. However, the problem with these models is that their prediction accuracy is considerably reduced when the duration of the COVID-19 outbreak is short. In this paper, we propose a new prediction method combining Word2Vec and the existing long short-term memory and Seq2Seq + Attention model. We compare the prediction error of the existing and proposed models with the COVID-19 prediction results reported from five US states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois. The results of the experiment show that the proposed model combining Word2Vec and the existing long short-term memory and Seq2Seq + Attention achieves better prediction results and lower errors than the existing long short-term memory and Seq2Seq + Attention models. In experiments, the Pearson correlation coefficient increased by 0.05 to 0.21 and the RMSE decreased by 0.03 to 0.08 compared to the existing method.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • Disease Outbreaks
  • Epidemics*
  • Humans
  • Time Factors

Grants and funding

This study was financially supported by National Information Society Agency (NIA), South Korea, Bigdataplatformteam-332 in the form of a grant (2023.3.7.) awarded to JPA. This study was also financially supported by National Research Foundation of Korea (https://www.nrf.re.kr/index) in the form of a grant (NRF-2022R1F1A1063961) awarded to BJ. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.