On Machine Learning-Based Short-Term Adjustment of Epidemiological Projections of COVID-19 in US

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Abstract

Epidemiological models have provided valuable information for the outlook of COVID-19 pandemic and relative impact of different mitigation scenarios. However, more accurate forecasts are often needed at near term for planning and staffing. We present our early results from a systemic analysis of short-term adjustment of epidemiological modeling of COVID 19 pandemic in US during March-April 2020. Our analysis includes the importance of various types of features for short term adjustment of the predictions. In addition, we explore the potential of data augmentation to address the data limitation for an emerging pandemic. Following published literature, we employ data augmentation via clustering of regions and evaluate a number of clustering strategies to identify early patterns from the data.

From our early analysis, we used CovidActNow as our underlying epidemiological model and found that the most impactful features for the one-day prediction horizon are population density, workers in commuting flow, number of deaths in the day prior to prediction date, and the autoregressive features of new COVID-19 cases from three previous dates of the prediction. Interestingly, we also found that counties clustered with New York County resulted in best preforming model with maximum of R 2 = 0.90 and minimum of R 2 =0.85 for state-based and COVID-based clustering strategy, respectively.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.11.20180521: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    2.1 Clustering Strategy: Clustering was conducted based on agglomerative hierarchal clustering algorithm (scikit-learn package), which is a bottom-up approach merging counties based on their similarities until reaching one big cluster.
    scikit-learn
    suggested: (scikit-learn, RRID:SCR_002577)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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