A graph convolutional network for predicting COVID-19 dynamics in 190 regions/countries.

INTRODUCTION: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) rapidly spread from Wuhan, China to other parts of China and other regions/countries around the world, resulting in a pandemic due to large populations moving through the massive transport hubs connecting all regions of China via railways and a major international airport. COVID-19 will remain a threat until safe and effective vaccines and antiviral drugs have been developed, distributed, and administered on a global scale. Thus, there is urgent need to establish effective implementation of preemptive non-pharmaceutical interventions for appropriate prevention and control strategies, and predicting future COVID-19 cases is required to monitor and control the issue.

METHODS: This study attempts to utilize a three-layer graph convolutional network (GCN) model to predict future COVID-19 cases in 190 regions and countries using COVID-19 case data, commercial flight route data, and digital maps of public transportation in terms of transnational human mobility. We compared the performance of the proposed GCN model to a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model on a dataset of COVID-19 cases (excluding the graph representation). The prediction performance of the models was evaluated using the mean squared error.

RESULTS: Our results demonstrate that the proposed GCN model can achieve better graph utilization and performance compared to the baseline in terms of both prediction accuracy and stability.

DISCUSSION: The proposed GCN model is a useful means to predict COVID-19 cases at regional and national levels. Such predictions can be used to facilitate public health solutions in public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using deep learning and data pooling. In addition, the proposed GCN model may help public health policymakers in decision making in terms of epidemic prevention and control strategies.