Application of one- three- and seven-day forecasts during early onset on the COVID-19 epidemic dataset using moving average autoregressive autoregressive moving average autoregressive integrated moving average and naïve forecasting methods

摘要

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread rapidly across the world since its appearance in December 2019. This data set creates one-, three-, and seven-day forecasts of the COVID-19 pandemic's cumulative case counts at the county, health district, and state geographic levels for the state of Virginia. Forecasts are created over the first 46 days of reported COVID-19 cases using the cumulative case count data provided by The New York Times as of April 22, 2020. From this historical data, one-, three-, seven, and all-days prior to the forecast start date are used to generate the forecasts. Forecasts are created using: (1) a Naïve approach; (2) Holt-Winters exponential smoothing (HW); (3) growth rate (Growth); (4) moving average (MA); (5) autoregressive (AR); (6) autoregressive moving average (ARMA); and (7) autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). Median Absolute Error (MdAE) and Median Absolute Percentage Error (MdAPE) metrics are created with each forecast to evaluate the forecast with respect to existing historical data. These error metrics are aggregated to provide a means for assessing which combination of forecast method, forecast length, and lookback length are best fits, based on lowest aggregated error at each geographic level.