COVID-19 Patient Count Prediction Using LSTM

In December 2019, a pandemic named COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China, and in a few weeks, it spread to more than 200 countries worldwide. Every country infected with the disease started taking necessary measures to stop the spread and provide the best possible medical facilities to infected patients and take precautionary measures to control the spread. As the infection spread was exponential, there arose a need to model infection spread patterns to estimate the patient volume computationally. Such patients’ estimation is the key to the necessary actions that local governments may take to counter the spread, control hospital load, and resource allocations. This article has used long short-term memory (LSTM) to predict the volume of COVID-19 patients in Pakistan. LSTM is a particular type of recurrent neural network (RNN) used for classification, prediction, and regression tasks. We have trained the RNN model on Covid-19 data (March 2020 to May 2020) of Pakistan and predict the Covid-19 Percentage of Positive Patients for June 2020. Finally, we have calculated the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) to find the model’s prediction effectiveness on different LSTM units, batch size, and epochs. Predicted patients are also compared with a prediction model for the same duration, and results revealed that the predicted patients’ count of the proposed model is much closer to the actual patient count.