COVID-19 Active Case Forecasts in Latin American Countries Using Score-Driven Models

Sergio Contreras-Espinoza (), Francisco Novoa-Muñoz, Szabolcs Blazsek, Pedro Vidal and Christian Caamaño-Carrillo
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Sergio Contreras-Espinoza: Departamento de Estadística, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad del Bío-Bío, Concepción 4081112, Chile
Francisco Novoa-Muñoz: Departamento de Estadística, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad del Bío-Bío, Concepción 4081112, Chile
Pedro Vidal: Departamento de Estadística, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad del Bío-Bío, Concepción 4081112, Chile
Christian Caamaño-Carrillo: Departamento de Estadística, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad del Bío-Bío, Concepción 4081112, Chile

Mathematics, 2022, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-17

Abstract: With the aim of mitigating the damage caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, it is important to use models that allow forecasting possible new infections accurately in order to face the pandemic in specific sociocultural contexts in the best possible way. Our first contribution is empirical. We use an extensive COVID-19 dataset from nine Latin American countries for the period of 1 April 2020 to 31 December 2021. Our second and third contributions are methodological. We extend relevant (i) state-space models with score-driven dynamics and (ii) nonlinear state-space models with unobserved components, respectively. We use weekly seasonal effects, in addition to the local-level and trend filters of the literature, for (i) and (ii), and the negative binomial distribution for (ii). We find that the statistical and forecasting performances of the novel score-driven specifications are superior to those of the nonlinear state-space models with unobserved components model, providing a potential valid alternative to forecasting the number of possible new COVID-19 infections.

Keywords: COVID-19; score-driven models; unobserved components; negative binomial distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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