An early prediction of covid-19 associated hospitalization surge using deep learning approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a deep learning approach using recurrent neural networks to predict COVID-19 hospitalization surges one week in advance, aiding resource allocation and early warning for healthcare providers.

Contribution

The study introduces a sequence-to-sequence model with attention for early COVID-19 hospitalization prediction, achieving high accuracy and AUC, which is novel in this context.

Findings

Sequence-to-sequence model with attention achieves 0.938 accuracy.

Model attains 0.850 AUC in predicting hospitalization surges.

Potential to provide early warnings for healthcare resource management.

Abstract

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 affects our lives in all aspects. As of September 11, more than 28 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 infection, and more than 911,000 people have lost their lives in this virus battle. Some patients can not receive appropriate medical treatment due the limits of hospitalization volume and shortage of ICU beds. An estimated future hospitalization is critical so that medical resources can be allocated as needed. In this study, we propose to use 4 recurrent neural networks to infer hospitalization change for the following week compared with the current week. Results show that sequence to sequence model with attention achieves a high accuracy of 0.938 and AUC of 0.850 in the hospitalization prediction. Our work has the potential to predict the hospitalization need and send a warning to medical providers and other stakeholders when a re-surge initializes.