Time series analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia using genetic programming

COVID-19 has emerged as a global pandemic over the past four months and has impacted more than 180 countries of the world. With a global increase rate of 3% to 5% daily cases, the virus seems to be a never ending process and WHO reports that the virus may stay here forever. So it becomes necessary to analyze the possible impact of the virus globally and present predictions on how it will behave in future. In this chapter, time series forecasting of COVID-19 with respect to Australia has been analyzed, and prediction models have been derived by using genetic programming. Two prediction models have been proposed, one each for confirmed cases and death cases. The results are validated and importance of prediction variables are presented and discussed. From the numerical results, it can be said that the proposed gene expression programming models are highly reliable and can be considered as standard for time series prediction for COVID-19 in Australia.