Forecasting the trend of Covid-19 epidemic

Abstract

Corona virus also known as COVID 19 is a critical ongoing pandemic that is on a rise across the globe. Italy and China have been considered as one of the main epicentres from where the pandemic came into full effect. Here, the highest death rates across the world are registered as a consequence of COVID-19. One of the leading countries, the USA has also been in the registered countries with an increasing number of cases of COVID 19. In this paper ARIMA model that is an auto regressive integrated moving average model is used to help forecast the epidemic trend over a period of time (i.e. April 2020). The dataset used is from the Italian epidemiological data at National and Regional level. It refers to the number of daily confirmed cases as well as the fatalities registered by Italian Ministry of Health. The model has various advantages like it is easy to use, to manage and a suitable model for forecasting purposes. Moreover, it gives a thorough clarity of basic trends, by predicting the hypothetical epidemic's inflection point and final size.