An interpretable hybrid predictive model of COVID-19 cases using autoregressive model and LSTM
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had a profound impact on global health and economy, making it crucial to build accurate and interpretable data-driven predictive models for COVID-19 cases to improve public policy making. The extremely large scale of the pandemic and the intrinsically changing transmission characteristics pose a great challenge for effectively predicting COVID-19 cases. To address this challenge, we propose a novel hybrid model in which the interpretability of the Autoregressive model (AR) and the predictive power of the long short-term memory neural networks (LSTM) join forces. The proposed hybrid model is formalized as a neural network with an architecture that connects two composing model blocks, of which the relative contribution is decided data-adaptively in the training procedure. We demonstrate the favorable performance of the hybrid model over its two single composing models as well as other popular predictive models through comprehensive numerical studies on two data sources under multiple evaluation metrics. Specifically, in county-level data of 8 California counties, our hybrid model achieves 4.173% MAPE, outperforming the composing AR (5.629%) and LSTM (4.934%) alone on average. In country-level datasets, our hybrid model outperforms the widely-used predictive models such as AR, LSTM, Support Vector Machines, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest, in predicting the COVID-19 cases in Japan, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, Italy, and the United Kingdom. In addition to the predictive performance, we illustrate the interpretability of our proposed hybrid model using the estimated AR component, which is a key feature that is not shared by most black-box predictive models for COVID-19 cases. Our study provides a new and promising direction for building effective and interpretable data-driven models for COVID-19 cases, which could have significant implications for public health policy making and control of the current COVID-19 and potential future pandemics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".