Forecasting the Spreading of COVID-19 across Nine Countries from Europe, Asia, and the American Continents Using the ARIMA Models

Since mid-November 2019, when the first SARS-CoV-2-infected patient was officially reported, the new coronavirus has affected over 10 million people from which half a million died during this short period. There is an urgent need to monitor, predict, and restrict COVID-19 in a more efficient manner. This is why Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models have been developed and used to predict the epidemiological trend of COVID-19 in Ukraine, Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, USA, Brazil, and India, these last three countries being otherwise the most affected presently. To increase accuracy, the daily prevalence data of COVID-19 from 10 March 2020 to 10 July 2020 were collected from the official website of the Romanian Government GOV.RO, World Health Organization (WHO), and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) websites. Several ARIMA models were formulated with different ARIMA parameters. ARIMA (1, 1, 0), ARIMA (3, 2, 2), ARIMA (3, 2, 2), ARIMA (3, 1, 1), ARIMA (1, 0, 3), ARIMA (1, 2, 0), ARIMA (1, 1, 0), ARIMA (0, 2, 1), and ARIMA (0, 2, 0) models were chosen as the best models, depending on their lowest Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) values for Ukraine, Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, USA, Brazil, and India (4.70244, 1.40016, 2.76751, 2.16733, 2.98154, 2.11239, 3.21569, 4.10596, 2.78051). This study demonstrates that ARIMA models are suitable for making predictions during the current crisis and offers an idea of the epidemiological stage of these regions.