Analyzing the State of COVID-19: Real-time Visual Data Analysis, Short-Term Forecasting, and Risk Factor Identification

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak was initially reported in Wuhan, China, and it has been declared as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020 by WHO. It has now spread to over 180 countries, and it has gradually evolved into a worldwide pandemic, endangering the state of global public health and becoming a serious threat to the global community. To combat and prevent the spread of the disease, all individuals should be well-informed of the rapidly changing state of COVID-19. To accomplish this objective, I have built a website to analyze and deliver the latest state of the disease and relevant analytical insights. The website is designed to cater to the general audience, and it aims to communicate insights through various straightforward and concise data visualizations that are supported by sound statistical methods, accurate data modeling, state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques, and reliable data sources. This paper discusses the major methodologies which are utilized to generate the insights displayed on the website, which include an automatic data ingestion pipeline, normalization techniques, moving average computation, ARIMA time-series forecasting, and logistic regression models. In addition, the paper highlights key discoveries that have been derived in regard to COVID-19 using the methodologies.