Epidemic Model Guided Machine Learning for COVID-19 Forecasts in the United States

Zou, D.; Wang, L.; Xu, P.; Chen, J.; Zhang, W.; Gu, Q.

We propose a new epidemic model (SuEIR) for forecasting the spread of COVID-19, including numbers of confirmed and fatality cases at national and state levels in the United States. Specifically, the SuEIR model is a variant of the SEIR model by taking into account the untested/unreported cases of COVID-19, and trained by machine learning algorithms based on the reported historical data. Besides providing basic projections for confirmed and fatality cases, the proposed SuEIR model is also able to predict the peak date of active cases, and estimate the basic reproduction number (R0). In particular, the forecasts based on our model suggest that the peak date of the US, New York state, and California state are 06/01/2020, 05/10/2020, and 07/01/2020 respectively. In addition, the estimated R0 of the US, New York state, and California state are 2.5, 3.6 and 2.2 respectively. The prediction results for all states in the US can be found on our project website: https://covid19.uclaml.org, which are updated on a weekly basis, and have been adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for COVID-19 death forecasts (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecasting-us.html).