Kalman filter based short term prediction model for COVID-19 spread

Singh, Koushlendra Kumar; Kumar, Suraj; Dixit, Prachi; Bajpai, Manish Kumar

Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID19) has emerged as a global medical emergency in the contemporary time. The spread scenario of this pandemic has shown many variations. Keeping all this in mind, this article is written after various studies and analysis on the latest data on COVID19 spread, which also includes the demographic and environmental factors. After gathering data from various resources, all data is integrated and passed into different Machine Learning Models in order to check its appropriateness. Ensemble Learning Technique, Random Forest, gives a good evaluation score on the tested data. Through this technique, various important factors are recognized and their contribution to the spread is analyzed. Also, linear relationships between various features are plotted through the heat map of Pearson Correlation matrix. Finally, Kalman Filter is used to estimate future spread of SARS-Cov-2, which shows good results on the tested data. The inferences from the Random Forest feature importance and Pearson Correlation gives many similarities and few dissimilarities, and these techniques successfully identify the different contributing factors. The Kalman Filter gives a satisfying result for short term estimation, but not so good performance for long term forecasting. Overall, the analysis, plots, inferences and forecast are satisfying and can help a lot in fighting the spread of the virus.