Study of ARIMA and least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) models for the prediction of SARS-CoV-2 confirmed cases in the most affected countries.

• The study is about the prediction of COVID-19 cases in major countries around the globe. Its Noble study. • It will help the different countries to make the decision on this virus. • ARIMA and LSSVM are the machine learning models, which computes accurate prediction with the least error. • The model provides the 99% approximate accuracy. • This manuscript will also help to all governments for preparing isolation wards, availability of medical staff, medicines requirement, the decision on lock down, economic plans, etc. Discussions about the recently identified deadly coronavirus disease (COVID-19) which originated in Wuhan, China in December 2019 are common around the globe now. This is an infectious and even life-threatening disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It has rapidly spread to other countries from its originating place infecting millions of people globally. To understand future phenomena, strong mathematical models are required with the least prediction errors. In the present study, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) models are applied to the data consisting of daily confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 in the most affected five countries of the world for modeling and predicting one-month confirmed cases of this disease. To validate these models, the prediction results were tested by comparing it with testing data. The results revealed better accuracy of the LS-SVM model over the ARIMA model and also suggested a rapid rise of SARS-CoV-2 confirmed cases in all the countries under study. This analysis would help governments to take necessary actions in advance associated with the preparation of isolation wards, availability of medicines and medical staff, a decision on lockdown, training of volunteers, and economic plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]