Piece-wise linear regression: A new approach to predict COVID-19 spreading

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is the most rapidly evolving global emergency since March 2020 and one of the most exercised topics in all aspects of the world. So far there are numerous articles that have been published related to COVID-19 in various disciplines of science and social context. Since from the very beginning, researchers have been trying to address some fundamental questions like how long it will sustain when it will reach the peak point of spreading, what will be the population of infections, cure, or death in the future. To address such issues researchers have been used several mathematical models from the very beginning around the world. The goal of such predictions is to take strategic control of the disease. In most of the cases, the predictions have deviated from the real data. In this paper, a mathematical model has been used which is not explored earlier in the COVID-19 predictions. The contribution of the work is to present a variant of the linear regression model is the piecewise linear regression, which performs relatively better compared to the other existing models. In our study, the COVID-19 data set of several states of India has been used.