Multiple-Input Deep Convolutional Neural Network Model for COVID-19 Forecasting in China

Abstract

Abstract COVID-19 is spreading all across the globe. Up until March 23, 2020, the confirmed cases in 173 countries and regions of the globe had surpassed 346,000, and more than 14,700 deaths had resulted. The confirmed cases outside of China had also reached over 81,000, with over 3,200 deaths. In this study, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was proposed to analyze and predict the number of confirmed cases. Several cities with the most confirmed cases in China were the focus of this study, and a COVID-19 forecasting model, based on the CNN deep neural network method, was proposed. To compare the overall efficacies of different algorithms, the indicators of mean absolute error and root mean square error were applied in the experiment of this study. The experiment results indicated that compared with other deep learning methods, the CNN model proposed in this study has the greatest prediction efficacy. The feasibility and practicality of the model in predicting the cumulative number of COVID-19 confirmed cases were also verified in this study.