Big data analytics and COVID-19: investigating the relationship between government policies and cases in Poland, Turkey and South Korea

Sözen, Mert Erkan; Sarıyer, Görkem; Ataman, Mustafa Gökalp

We used big data analytics for exploring the relationship between government response policies, human mobility trends and numbers of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases comparatively in Poland, Turkey and South Korea. We collected daily mobility data of retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential areas. For quantifying the actions taken by governments and making a fairness comparison between these countries, we used stringency index values measured with the ‘Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker’. For the Turkey case, we also developed a model by implementing the multilayer perceptron algorithm for predicting numbers of cases based on the mobility data. We finally created scenarios based on the descriptive statistics of the mobility data of these countries and generated predictions on the numbers of cases by using the developed model. Based on the descriptive analysis, we pointed out that while Poland and Turkey had relatively closer values and distributions on the study variables, South Korea had more stable data compared to Poland and Turkey. We mainly showed that while the stringency index of the current day was associated with mobility data of the same day, the current day’s mobility was associated with the numbers of cases 1 month later. By obtaining 89.3% prediction accuracy, we also concluded that the use of mobility data and implementation of big data analytics technique may enable decision-making in managing uncertain environments created by outbreak situations. We finally proposed implications for policymakers for deciding on the targeted levels of mobility to maintain numbers of cases in a manageable range based on the results of created scenarios.