Modeling and prediction of the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 based on the SINDy-LM method

The transmission dynamics of COVID-19 is investigated in this study. A SINDy-LM modeling method that can effectively balance model complexity and prediction accuracy is proposed based on data-driven technique. First, the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamical systems (SINDy) method is used to discover and describe the nonlinear functional relationship between the dynamic terms in the model in accordance with the observation data of the COVID-19 epidemic. Moreover, the Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm is utilized to optimize the obtained model for improving the accuracy of the SINDy algorithm. Second, the obtained model, which is consistent with the logistic model in mathematical form with small errors and high robustness, is leveraged to review the epidemic situation in China. Otherwise, the evolution of the epidemic in Australia and Egypt is predicted, which demonstrates that this method has universality for constructing the global COVID-19 model. The proposed model is also compared with the extreme learning machine (ELM), which shows that the prediction accuracy of the SINDy-LM method outperforms that of the ELM method and the generated model has higher sparsity.