Forecasting the Spread of Daily Confirmed Covid-19 Cases in Malaysia

Abstract

COVID-19 is rapidly expanding across the globe. As a Southeast Asian region, Malaysia has also been affected by COVID-19. Since the COVID-19 outbreak first emerged in China at the end of 2019, Malaysia has taken precautionary measures to prevent entering the nation. However, since COVID-19 is more than undoubtedly unstoppable, Malaysia eventually received the first case in early January 2020. The increase in the epidemic scale has led to the (preface of non-pharmaceutical countermeasures). Hence, it is of utmost importance to analyze the trends of the cases to develop a forecasting model that could anticipate the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Malaysia and select the best forecasting model based on forecast measure accuracy to forecast the future course of outcomes. For this purpose, the number of daily cases from 15 March 2020 to 31 March 2021 was retrieved from the Ministry of Health (MOH) website and estimated using the Box-Jenkins approach. There were five models developed such ARIMA (1,1,1), ARIMA (1,1,2), ARIMA (1,1,3), ARIMA (2,1,1) and ARIMA (2,1,2). The models' effectiveness is evaluated based on AIC, BIC and RMSE criteria. The findings indicate that ARIMA (1,1,3) is the preferred model for forecasting since it has better performance regarding adopted criteria than compared models. The forecasted values showed an upward trend of COVID-19 cases until January 2022. In conclusion, subsequent studies would yield more discoveries and a more systematic approach to have better and more accurate forecasting. In the instance of the COVID-19, the recommended model appears to be correct. More complex modelling methodologies and extensive information on the disease are required to forecast the pandemic.

Time series analysis on Alpha, Delta, and Omicron waves of COVID-19 infections in Indian provinces

“…ARIMA (1, 2, 1) is the best-fitted model for confirmed cases, while ARIMA (3, 2, 1) is the best-fitted model for COVID-19 death cases to forecast and predict the time evolution of COVID-19 in Morocco, according to (22). Januri et al (2022) fitted ARIMA (1,1,1), ARIMA (1,1,2), ARIMA (1,1,3), ARIMA (2,1,1), and ARIMA (2,1,2) models and found that ARIMA (1,1,3) was the best fitted ARIMA model for the spread of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases in Malaysia (14). Kibria et al (2022) observed that ARIMA (8,1,7) was the best-fitted ARIMA model for forecasting the spread of the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh.…”