Countries in the world are suffering from COVID-19 and would like to control it. Thus, some authorities voted for new policies and even stopped passenger air traffic. Those decisions were not uniform, and this study focuses on how passenger air traffic might influence the spread of COVID-19 in the world. We used data sets of cases from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University and air transport (passengers carried) from the World Bank. Besides, we computed Poisson, QuasiPoisson, Negative binomial, zero-inflated Poisson, and zero-inflated negative binomial models with cross-validation to make sure that our findings are robust. Actually, when passenger air traffic increases by one unit, the number of cases increases by one new infection.
Researchers have been working with different models to forecast COVID-19 cases. Many of their estimates are not accurate. This study aims to propose the best model to forecast COVID-19 cumulative cases using a machine learning technic. It is a work that focused on time series univariate models because there are too many debates about the quality of the pandemic data. To increase the likelihood of the findings, we avoided many variables modeling and proposed a robust process to forecast COVID-19 cumulative cases. It will help international institutions to take optimal decisions about the world economy and response to the pandemic. Consequently, we used the data titled ”Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)” from ”Our World in Data” about cases from 22 January 2020 to 30 November 2020. We computed Error Trend Season (ETS), Exponential smoothing with multiplicative error-trend, and ARIMA on the training data sets. In addition, we calculated the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) per model. Among those models, we notice that ETS (with additive error-trend and no season) has the smallest MAPE statistics compared to the others. The findings revealed that with the ETS model we need at least 100 days to have good forecasts with a MAPE threshold of 1%
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