Machine Learning–Based Prediction of Growth in Confirmed COVID-19 Infection Cases in 114 Countries Using Metrics of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions and Cultural Dimensions: Model Development and Validation (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND National governments worldwide have implemented nonpharmaceutical interventions to control the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigate its effects. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the prediction of future daily national confirmed COVID-19 infection growth—the percentage change in total cumulative cases—across 14 days for 114 countries using nonpharmaceutical intervention metrics and cultural dimension metrics, which are indicative of specific national sociocultural norms. METHODS We combined the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker data set, Hofstede cultural dimensions, and daily reported COVID-19 infection case numbers to train and evaluate five non–time series machine learning models in predicting confirmed infection growth. We used three validation methods—in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and country-based cross-validation—for the evaluation, each of which was applicable to a different use case of the models. RESULTS Our results demonstrate high R2 values between the labels and predictions for the in-distribution method (0.959) and moderate R2 values for the out-of-distribution and country-based cross-validation methods (0.513 and 0.574, respectively) using random forest and adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) regression. Although these models may be used to predict confirmed infection growth, the differing accuracies obtained from the three tasks suggest a strong influence of the use case. CONCLUSIONS This work provides new considerations in using machine learning techniques with nonpharmaceutical interventions and cultural dimensions as metrics to predict the national growth of confirmed COVID-19 infections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".