Jakarta Pandemic to Endemic Transition: Forecasting COVID-19 Using NNAR and LSTM

Abstract

In December 2021, the latest COVID-19 variant, Omicron, was confirmed in Indonesia. Unlike the Delta variant, the number of deaths in the Omicron type did not increase significantly and remained constant, even though the cases increased significantly. It is hoped that Indonesia will declare COVID-19 endemic. Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia and the first city where the new COVID-19 virus emerged. Therefore, we are trying to model COVID-19 cases in Jakarta and predict future cases to see if endemic conditions are identified. We applied Neural Network Auto-Regressive (NNAR) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) methods. It is found that the NNAR forecast better for positive confirmed cases with an R-squared 0.939 and the LSTM forecast better for cases of death with an R-squared 0.9337. The forecasting results for the next 7 days reveal that positive confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Jakarta will increase slightly. In addition, the death cases experienced a very small increase, only one new case. According to the results of this study, it can be concluded that COVID-19 in Jakarta will enter an endemic phase in Jakarta, with no substantial increase in cases and a low mortality rate.