An Exploration and Forecast of COVID-19 in Mexico with Machine Learning

Abstract

Background: To understand and approach the COVID-19 spread, Machine Learning offers fundamental tools. This study presents the use of machine learning techniques for the projection of COVID-19 infections and deaths in Mexico. The research has three main objectives: first, to identify which function adjusts the best to the infected population growth in Mexico; second, to determine the feature importance of climate and mobility; third, to compare the results of a traditional time series statistical model with a modern approach in machine learning. The motivation for this work is to support health care providers in their preparation and planning. Methods: The methods used are linear, polynomial, and generalized logistic regression models to evaluate the growth of the COVID-19 incidents in the country. Additionally, machine learning and time-series techniques are used to identify feature importance and perform forecasting for daily cases and fatalities. The study uses the publicly available data sets from the John Hopkins University of Medicine in conjunction with mobility rates obtained from Google’s Mobility Reports and climate variables acquired from Weather Online. Results: The results suggest that the logistic growth model fits best the behavior of the pandemic in Mexico, that there is a significant correlation of climate and mobility variables with the disease numbers, and that LSTM is a more suitable approach for the prediction of daily cases. Conclusion: We hope that this study can make some contributions to the world’s response to this epidemic as well as give some references for future research.