Prediction of COVID-19 Active, Recovered, and Death Cases Using Artificial Neural Network and Grey Wolf Optimization

Introduction

The COVID-19 global epidemic, widely identified as a coronavirus outbreak, is a growing global coronavirus disease contagion in 2019 (COVID-19), triggered by extreme acute respiratory coronavirus syndrome 2 (SARS CoV2) (Dey, J. K., et al., 2020, Vaishya, R et al., 2020, Law, P. K. et al., 2020). The outbreak was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. On 30th January the epidemic was declared an international public health emergency by the World Health Organization (Hui, D. S et al., 2020, Atique, S et al., 2020). The World Health Organization announced the disease on 30th January 2020 as a public health emergency of global importance and on 11th March as a pandemic. About 13.8 million cases of COVID-19 as of 17th July 2020 have been reported in more than 188 countries and territories, resulting beyond 589,000 deaths; over and above 7.71 million people have recovered. Globally COVID-19 pandemic is now one of the major concerns around the globe. Due to this pandemic the world is going through a tough situation. The world came to a standstill for this pandemic. Round the globe all are facing a tensed situation. Mortality rate and transmission of the disease is growing rapidly throughout the world though in some countries it has become stable. All countries seek to save their lives by enforcing steps such as travel bans, quarantines, postponements and cancellations of activities, social barriers, examinations, hard and soft lockdowns (Acter, T et al.,2020, Moon, M. J et al.,2020). It has an impact upon the survival of mankind economically and socially. People infected with the virus thus face difficulty in breathing because of fluid and pus in the lung. This happens because of the air sacs swelling in one or both lungs. The most general signs and symptoms of COVID-19 are dry-cough, nausea, fever, and some uncommon symptoms such as body aches, sore throat, diarrhea, the headache of conjunctivitis, skin rash, loss of taste or smell, or discoloration of the finger or toe, difficulty breathing, chest pain etc (Larsen, J. R et al., 2020, Johansson, M. A et al.,2021, da Rosa Mesquita, R et al., 2021). So, if someone has some of those symptoms, COVID-19 test may be referred to. On 7th July 2020, there are 98192 cumulative cases of infection worldwide and 3,045 deaths have been reported.

Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term where Machine Learning (ML) and deep learning are part of it and play an important role for solving many complex real-world problems. Artificial Intelligence techniques applied in almost all the domains like in business, natural language processing, climate prediction, finance modeling, robotics, gaming, healthcare, genomics and genetics, software engineering, networking, speech, and image processing etc. as every domain need intelligence (Libbrecht, M. W et al.,2015, Ramprasad, R et al., 2017, Carbonell, J. G et al., 1983, Magoulas, G. D et al.,1999, July).The learning of ML techniques is usually based on hit and trial methods very contrary to traditional algorithms, which implement programming instructions such as if-else type of decision statements. Forecasting or prediction is one of the fascinating aspects of ML which have been used to decide the future actions in many application domains such as market condition prediction, climate prediction, disease transmission, and mortality rate prediction, forecasting of economic scenarios etc. (Krollner, B et al., 2010, April, Bontempi, G et al., 2012, July). Artificial Neural Network (ANN) methods and specific regression techniques are widely applicable in foretelling patient problems with a particular disease in the future. There are several studies carried out to predict different diseases using the above-mentioned techniques such as coronary artery disease, cardiovascular disease, and breast cancer forecasting (Chen, M et al., Hao, 2017, Mohan, S et al., 2019, Sriram, T. V et al., 2013). This research primarily focuses on live forecasting of confirmed COVID-19 cases and the research also focuses on COVID-19 pandemic prediction and early intervention. Such prediction systems can be highly useful in taking decisions to control the present scenario in order to direct early responses for very successful management of these diseases.