CoviHawkes: Temporal Point Process and Deep Learning based Covid-19 forecasting for India

Abstract: Lockdowns are one of the most effective measures for containing the spread of a pandemic. Unfortunately, they involve a heavy financial and emotional toll on the population that often outlasts the lockdown itself. This article argues in favor of ``local'' lockdowns, which are lockdowns focused on regions currently experiencing an outbreak. We propose a machine learning tool called CoviHawkes based on temporal point processes, called CoviHawkes that predicts the daily case counts for Covid-19 in India at the national, state, and district levels. Our short-term predictions ($<30$ days) may be helpful for policymakers in identifying regions where a local lockdown must be proactively imposed to arrest the spread of the virus. Our long-term predictions (up to a few months) simulate the progression of the pandemic under various lockdown conditions, thereby providing a noisy indicator for a potential third wave of cases in India. Extensive experimental results validate the performance of our tool at all levels.