Scientists Develop a Machine Learning Model to Predict the Evolution of an Epidemic Accurately - CBIRT

According to a new KAUST study, machine learning approaches can achieve an assumption-free analysis of epidemic case data with amazingly good prediction accuracy and the flexibility to incorporate new data dynamically. Yasminah Alali, an intern in KAUST's 2021 Saudi Summer Internship (SSI) program, developed a proof of concept that reveals a possible alternative to traditional parameter-driven mechanistic models by removing human bias and assumptions from analysis, revealing the underlying story of the data. Using publicly released COVID-19 incidence and recovery data from India and Brazil, Alali leveraged her experience working with artificial intelligence models to design a framework to fit the characteristics and time-evolving nature of epidemic data in collaboration with KAUST's Ying Sun and Fouzi Harrou. To create an effective Gaussian process regression (GPR) based model for forecasting recovered and confirmed COVID-19 cases in two significantly impacted countries, India and Brazil, the researchers first used Bayesian optimization to modify the Gaussian process regression (GPR) hyperparameters. However, the time dependency in the COVID-19 data series is ignored by machine learning models.