National Holidays and Social Mobility Behaviors: Alternatives for Forecasting COVID-19 Deaths in Brazil.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH 2021;
18:ijerph182111595. [PMID:
34770108 PMCID:
PMC8582864 DOI:
10.3390/ijerph182111595]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/29/2021] [Revised: 10/30/2021] [Accepted: 10/31/2021] [Indexed: 01/08/2023]
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the influence of holidays and community mobility on the transmission rate and death count of COVID-19 in Brazil. We identify national holidays and hallmark holidays to assess their effect on disease reports of confirmed cases and deaths. First, we use a one-variate model with the number of infected people as input data to forecast the number of deaths. This simple model is compared with a more robust deep learning multi-variate model that uses mobility and transmission rates (R0, Re) from a SEIRD model as input data. A principal components model of community mobility, generated by the principal component analysis (PCA) method, is added to improve the input features for the multi-variate model. The deep learning model architecture is an LSTM stacked layer combined with a dense layer to regress daily deaths caused by COVID-19. The multi-variate model incremented with engineered input features can enhance the forecast performance by up to 18.99% compared to the standard one-variate data-driven model.
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