The Hybrid Forecasting Method SVR-ESAR for Covid-19

Abstract

We know that SARS-Cov2 produces the new COVID-19 disease, which is one of the most dangerous pandemics of modern times. This pandemic has critical health and economic consequences, and even the health services of the large, powerful nations may be saturated. Thus, forecasting the number of infected persons in any country is essential for controlling the situation. In the literature, different forecasting methods have been published, attempting to solve the problem. However, a simple and accurate forecasting method is required for its implementation in any part of the world. This paper presents a precise and straightforward forecasting method named SVR-ESAR  (Support Vector regression hybridized with the classical Exponential smoothing and ARIMA). We applied this method to the infected time series in four scenarios, which we have taken for the Github repository: the Whole World, China, the US, and Mexico. We compared our results with those of the literature showing the proposed method has the best accuracy.