AGGFORCLUS: A hybrid methodology integrating forecasting with clustering to assess mitigation plans and contagion risk in pandemic outbreaks: the COVID-19 Case Study

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic showed governments’ unpreparedness as decision-makers hastily created restrictions and policies to contain its spread. Identifying prospective areas with a higher contagion risk can reduce mitigation planning uncertainty. This research proposes a risk assessment metric called AGGFORCLUS that integrates time-series forecasting and clustering to convey joint information on predicted caseload growth and variability, thereby providing an educated yet visually simple view of the risk status. In AGGFORCLUS, the development is sectioned into three phases. Phase I forecasts confirmed cases using a mixture of five different forecasting methods. Phase II develops the identified best model forecasts for an extended ten-day horizon, including their prediction intervals. In Phase III, we calculate average growth metrics for predictions and use them to cluster series by their multidimensional average growth. We present the results for various countries framed into a nine-quadrant risk-grouped associated measure linked to the expected cumulative caseload progress and uncertainty.