Aims: Due to the terrible effects of 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) on health systems and the global economy, the necessity to study future trends of the virus outbreaks around the world is seriously felt. Since geographical mobility is a risk factor of the disease, it has spread to most of the countries recently. It, therefore, necessitates to design a decision support model to 1) identify the spread pattern of coronavirus and, 2) provide reliable information for the detection of future trends of the virus outbreaks.
Materials & Methods: The present study adopts a computational intelligence approach to detect the possible trends in the spread of 2019-nCoV in China for a one-month period. Then, a validated model for detecting future trends in the spread of the virus in France is proposed. It uses ANN (Artificial Neural Network) and a combination of ANN and GA (Genetic Algorithm), PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), and ICA (Imperialist Competitive Algorithm) as predictive models.
Findings: The models work on the basis of data released from the past and the present days from WHO (World Health Organization). By comparing four proposed models, ANN and GA-ANN achieve a high degree of accuracy in terms of performance indicators.
Conclusion: The models proposed in the present study can be used as decision support tools for managing and controlling of 2019-nCoV outbreaks.