Network Autoregressive Model for the Prediction of COVID-19 Considering the Disease Interaction in Neighboring Countries |
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Authors: | Arash Sioofy Khoojine Mahdi Shadabfar Vahid Reza Hosseini Hadi Kordestani |
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Institution: | 1.Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Yibin University, Yibin 644000, China;2.Center for Infrastructure Sustainability and Resilience Research, Department of Civil Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran 145888-9694, Iran;3.Institute for Advanced Study, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China;4.Department of Civil Engineering, Qingdao University of Technology, Qingdao 266033, China; |
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Abstract: | Predicting the way diseases spread in different societies has been thus far documented as one of the most important tools for control strategies and policy-making during a pandemic. This study is to propose a network autoregressive (NAR) model to forecast the number of total currently infected cases with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Iran until the end of December 2021 in view of the disease interactions within the neighboring countries in the region. For this purpose, the COVID-19 data were initially collected for seven regional nations, including Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Thenceforth, a network was established over these countries, and the correlation of the disease data was calculated. Upon introducing the main structure of the NAR model, a mathematical platform was subsequently provided to further incorporate the correlation matrix into the prediction process. In addition, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) was utilized to determine the model parameters and optimize the forecasting accuracy. Thereafter, the number of infected cases up to December 2021 in Iran was predicted by importing the correlation matrix into the NAR model formed to observe the impact of the disease interactions in the neighboring countries. In addition, the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) was used as a benchmark to compare and validate the NAR model outcomes. The results reveal that COVID-19 data in Iran have passed the fifth peak and continue on a downward trend to bring the number of total currently infected cases below 480,000 by the end of 2021. Additionally, 20%, 50%, 80% and 95% quantiles are provided along with the point estimation to model the uncertainty in the forecast. |
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Keywords: | COVID-19 Iran timeseries prediction infected cases ARIMA model correlation matrix network autoregressive (NAR) model |
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