Forecast of COVID-19 Cases in Nigeria: An implementation of an ARIMA model (Preprint)
BACKGROUND The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) is a global pandemic and Nigeria is not left out in being affected. Though, the disease is just over three months since first case was identified in the country, we present a predictive model to forecast the number of cases expected to be seen in the country in the next 100 days. OBJECTIVE To implement a predictive model in forecasting the near future number of positive cases expected in the country following the present trend METHODS We performed an Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model prediction on the epidemiological data obtained from Nigerian Centre for Disease Control to predict the epidemiological trend of the prevalence and incidence of COVID-2019. RESULTS There were 93 time series data points which lacked stationarity. From our ARIMA model, it is expected that the number of new cases declared per day will keep rising and towards the early September, 2020, Nigeria is expected to have well above sixty thousand confirmed cases. CONCLUSIONS We however believe that as we have more data points our model will be better fine-tuned.