Predict The Spread of COVID-19 in Iran with A SEIR Model

The current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has recently been declared a pandemic and spread over 200 countries and territories. Forecasting the long-term trend of the COVID-19 epidemic can help health authorities determine the transmission characteristics of the virus and take appropriate prevention and control strategies beforehand. Previous studies that solely applied traditional epidemic models or machine learning models were subject to underfitting or overfitting problems. This paper designed a predictive model based on the mathematical model Susceptible-Exposed-Infective-Recovered (SEIR). SEIR is represented by a set of differential-algebraic equations incorporated with machine learning techniques to fit the data reported to estimate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in long-term in the Islamic Republic of Iran up to the end of July 0f 2020. This paper reduced R0 after a certain amount of days to account for containment measures and used delays to allow for lagging official data. Two evaluation criteria, R2 and RMSE, had used in this research which estimates the model on officially reported confirmed cases from different regions in Iran. The results proved the model's effectiveness in simulating and predicting the trend of the COVID-19 outbreak. Results showed the integrated approach of epidemic and machine learning models could accurately forecast the long-term trend of the COVID-19 outbreak.