COVID-19 Forecast and Bank Credit Decision Model Based on BiLSTM-Attention Network

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has caused drastic fluctuations in the economies of various countries. Meanwhile, the governments’ ability to save the economy depends on how banks provide credit to troubled companies. Therefore, the impact of the epidemic on bank credit and inclusive finance are worth exploring. However, most of the existing studies focus on the reform of the financial and economic system, only paying attention to the theoretical mechanism analysis and effect adjustment, scant data support, and insufficient scheme landing. At the same time, with the rise and rapid development of artificial intelligence technology in recent years, all walks of life have introduced it into real scenes for multi-source heterogeneous big data analysis and decision-making assistance. Therefore, we first take the Chinese mainland as an example in this paper. By studying the impact of the epidemic on bank credit preference and the mechanism of inclusive finance, we can provide objective decision-making basis for the financial system in the post-epidemic era to better flow credit funds into various entities and form a new perspective for related research. Then, we put forward a model based on Bi-directional Long Short-term Memory Network (BiLSTM) and Attention Mechanism to predict the number of newly diagnosed cases during the COVID-19 pandemic every day. It is not only suitable for COVID-19 pandemic data characterized by time series and nonlinearity, but also can adaptively select the most relevant input data by introducing an Attention Mechanism, which can solve the problems of huge calculation and inaccurate prediction results. Finally, through experiments and empirical research, we draw the following conclusions: (1) The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will promote enterprises to increase credit. (2) Banks provide more credit to large enterprises. (3) The epidemic has different impacts on credit in different regions, with the most significant one on central China. (4) Banks tend to provide more credit to manufacturing industries under the epidemic. (5) Digital inclusive finance plays a (positive) regulating effect on bank credit in COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by the research results, policymakers can consider further solving the information asymmetry and strengthening the construction of a credit system, and more direct financial support policies for enterprises should be adopted. (6) By adopting the COVID-19 prediction model based on the BiLSTM-Attention network to accurately predict the epidemic situation in the COVID-19 pandemic, it can provide an important basis for the formulation of epidemic prevention and control policies.