Fine-Grained Forecasting of COVID-19 Trends at the County Level in the United States.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has profoundly impacted various aspects of daily life, society, healthcare systems, and global health policies. This pandemic has resulted in more than one hundred million people being infected and, unfortunately, the loss of life for many individuals. Although treatment for the coronavirus is now available, effective forecasting of COVID-19 infection is the most importance to aid public health officials in making critical decisions. However, forecasting COVID-19 trends through time-series analysis poses significant challenges due to the data's inherently dynamic, transient, and noise-prone nature. In this study, we have developed the Fine-Grained Infection Forecast Network (FIGI-Net) model, which provides accurate forecasts of COVID-19 trends up to two weeks in advance. FIGI-Net addresses the current limitations in COVID-19 forecasting by leveraging fine-grained county-level data and a stacked bidirectional LSTM structure. We employ a pre-trained model to capture essential global infection patterns. Subsequently, these pre-trained parameters were transferred to train localized sub-models for county clusters exhibiting comparable infection dynamics. This model adeptly handles sudden changes and rapid fluctuations in data, frequently observed across various times and locations of county-level data, ultimately improving the accuracy of COVID-19 infection forecasting at the county, state, and national levels. FIGI-Net model demonstrated significant improvement over other deep learning-based models and state-of-the-art COVID-19 forecasting models, evident in various standard evaluation metrics. Notably, FIGI-Net model excels at forecasting the direction of infection trends, especially during the initial phases of different COVID-19 outbreak waves. Our study underscores the effectiveness and superiority of our time-series deep learning-based methods in addressing dynamic and sudden changes in infection numbers over short-term time periods. These capabilities facilitate efficient public health management and the early implementation of COVID-19 transmission prevention measures.