COVID-19 mortality rate prediction for India using statistical neural networks and gaussian process regression model

The primary purpose of this research is to identify the best COVID-19 mortality model for India using regression models and is to estimate the future COVID-19 mortality rate for India. Specifically, Statistical Neural Networks ( Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN), Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN)), and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) are applied to develop the COVID-19 Mortality Rate Prediction (MRP) model for India. For that purpose, there are two types of dataset used in this study: One is COVID-19 Death cases, a Time Series Data and the other is COVID-19 Confirmed Case and Death Cases where Death case is dependent variable and the Confirmed case is an independent variable. Hyperparameter optimization or tuning is used in these regression models, which is the process of identifying a set of optimal hyperparameters for any learning process with minimal error. Here, sigma (σ) is a hyperparameter whose value is used to constrain the learning process of the above models with minimum Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). The performance of the models is evaluated using the RMSE and 'R2 values, which shows that the GRP model performs better than the GRNN and RBFNN.

Keywords
Covid-19; India; mortality rate; mortality prediction; regression model; hyperparameter tuning; GPR; GRNN; RBFNN.