Prediction for Decision Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The task known as prediction is widely applied in several different areas of knowledge, from popular applications such as weather forecasting, going through supply chain management, an increasing range of adoption in healthcare and, more specifically in epidemiology, the central topic of this book. The new challenges brought with the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the possibilities and necessity of using prediction techniques to support decisions related to epidemiology in both managerial and clinical areas. In practice, the current outbreak created a strong need for the adoption of different computational models to support both medical teams and public health administrators. The methods vary from simple linear regressions to very complex algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. The present chapter contextualizes the use of prediction for decision support as a foundation of the following chapters which are focused on the application for the COVID-19 pandemic time series. With such a large number of methods for data-driven predictions, a clear distinction between explanation and prediction is firstly provided. From there, a methodological framework is presented, from the data source definition and selection of countries as references for the analysis, going through data handling for validation, until the definition of the evaluation criteria for the proposed models.