Prediction of COVID-19 Trend in India and Its Four Worst-Affected States Using Modified SEIRD and LSTM Models.

Since the beginning of COVID-19 (corona virus disease 2019), the Indian government implemented several policies and restrictions to curtail its spread. The timely decisions taken by the government helped in decelerating the spread of COVID-19 to a large extent. Despite these decisions, the pandemic continues to spread. Future predictions about the spread can be helpful for future policy-making, i.e., to plan and control the COVID-19 spread. Further, it is observed throughout the world that asymptomatic corona cases play a major role in the spread of the disease. This motivated us to include such cases for accurate trend prediction. India was chosen for the study as the population and population density is very high for India, resulting in the spread of the disease at high speed. In this paper, the modified SEIRD (susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered-deceased) model is proposed for predicting the trend and peak of COVID-19 in India and its four worst-affected states. The modified SEIRD model is based on the SEIRD model, which also uses an asymptomatic exposed population that is asymptomatic but infectious for the predictions. Further, a deep learning-based long short-term memory (LSTM) model is also used for trend prediction in this paper. Predictions of LSTM are compared with the predictions obtained from the proposed modified SEIRD model for the next 30 days. The epidemiological data up to 6th September 2020 have been used for carrying out predictions in this paper. Different lockdowns imposed by the Indian government have also been used in modeling and analyzing the proposed modified SEIRD model.