Tracking and forecasting milepost moments of the epidemic in the early-outbreak: framework and applications to the COVID-19

Huiwen Wang; Yanwen Zhang; Shan Lu; Shanshan Wang

Moreover, there exist many challenges for the prediction of a new epidemic situation similar to the COVID-19. First, little prior knowledge can be used to analogize or refer to for a brand new epidemic; secondly, the existence of government management will make the development of the epidemic completely different from that under free development, thus how to incorporate the influence of government measures into the fitting process of parameters and build a statistical model from this should be taken into consideration; thirdly, in the early-outbreak the initial data often fluctuates violently and the data quality is low, thus many commonly used parameter estimation methods are not applicable anymore; furthermore, the amount of data in early stage is too small, so it is difficult to directly rely on the inertia of the data to make forward prediction. In summary, in the early stages of brand new epidemics, how to use some low-quality and small data sets to make basic and relatively accurate forecast judgments for the entire process of the epidemic, is a long-term pain point.