Nonlinear Autoregressive Neural Network for Forecasting COVID-19 Confirmed Cases in Malaysia

Abstract

A nonlinear autoregressive neural network (NARNN) model is a feedforward neural network for handling complex nonlinear time series problem. In this study, the tangent sigmoid (tansig) activation function with different number of past values and different number of hidden neurons for NARNN model is determined. The COVID-19 daily confirmed cases in Malaysia are collected with different amount of sample used which are 100, 500 and 900. Therefore, data of 100, 500 and 900 days prior to 21 September 2022 are extracted for the NARNN model training, validation and testing procedure. The lowest average mean squared error (MSE) are considered as the best combination. Result shown that the past value 1:10 and number of neurons of 10 when the sample size is 100. At sample size 500, past values of 1:10 and number of neurons of 8 enables the model to perform at its best. Whereas for sample size 900, network setting of 1:5 past value and 5 hidden neurons gives the least MSE. Multi-step ahead time series forecasting is conducted to forecast the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases in 7 days which is from 22 to 28 September 2022. The result shown for 7-days-ahead confirmed cases forecasting Malaysia datasets, the best forecasting outcome occurs when 900 samples are inputted.