A novel framework for COVID-19 case prediction through piecewise regression in India

Int J Inf Technol. 2021;13(1):41-48. doi: 10.1007/s41870-020-00552-3. Epub 2020 Nov 10.

Abstract

Outbreak of COVID-19, created a disastrous situation in more than 200 countries around the world. Thus the prediction of the future trend of the disease in different countries can be useful for managing the outbreak. Several data driven works have been done for the prediction of COVID-19 cases and these data uses features of past data for future prediction. In this study the machine learning (ML)-guided linear regression model has been used to address the different types of COVID-19 related issues. The linear regression model has been fitted into the dataset to deal with the total number of positive cases, and the number of recoveries for different states in India such as Maharashtra, West Bengal, Kerala, Delhi and Assam. From the current analysis of COVID-19 data it has been observed that trend of per day number of infection follows linearly and then increases exponentially. This property has been incorporated into our prediction and the piecewise linear regression is the best suited model to adopt this property. The experimental results shows the superiority of the proposed scheme and to the best of our knowledge this is a new approach towards the prediction of COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; Doubling rate; Linear regression; Machine learning (ML); Unlock.