<p>The new so-called COVID-19 virus is unfortunately founded to
be highly transmissible across the globe. In this study, we propose a novel
approach for estimating the spread level of the virus for each country for
three different dates between April and May 2020. Unlike previous studies, this
investigation does not process any historical data of spread but rather relies
on the socio-economic indicators of each country. Actually, more than 1000 socio-economic
indicators and more than 190 countries were processed in this study.
Concretely, data preprocessing techniques and feature selection approaches were
applied to extract relevant indicators for the classification process. Countries
around the globe were assigned to 4 classes of spread. To find the class level
of each country, many classifiers were proposed based especially on Support
Vectors Machines (SVM), Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) and Random Forests (RF). Obtained
results show the relevance of our approach since many classifiers succeeded in
capturing the spread level, especially the RF classifier, with an F-measure
equal to 93.85% for April 15th, 2020. Moreover, a feature importance study is
conducted to deduce the best indicators to build robust spread level
classifiers. However, as pointed out in the discussion, classifiers may face
some difficulties for future dates since the huge increase of cases and the
lack of other relevant factors affecting this widespread.<i></i></p>
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.