Toward Smart Lockdown: A Novel Approach for COVID-19 Hotspots Prediction Using a Deep Hybrid Neural Network

COVID-19 caused the largest economic recession in the history by placing more than one third of world’s population in lockdown. The prolonged restrictions on economic and business activities caused huge economic turmoil that significantly affected the financial markets. To ease the growing pressure on the economy, scientists proposed intermittent lockdowns commonly known as “smart lockdowns”. Under smart lockdown, areas that contain infected clusters of population, namely hotspots, are placed on lockdown, while economic activities are allowed to operate in un-infected areas. In this study, we proposed a novel deep learning prediction framework for the accurate prediction of hotpots. We exploit the benefits of two deep learning models, i.e., Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and propose a hybrid framework that has the ability to extract multi time-scale features from convolutional layers of CNN. The multi time-scale features are then concatenated and provide as input to 2-layers LSTM model. The LSTM model identifies short, medium and long-term dependencies by learning the representation of time-series data. We perform a series of experiments and compare the proposed framework with other state-of-the-art statistical and machine learning based prediction models. From the experimental results, we demonstrate that the proposed framework beats other existing methods with a clear margin.