Modelling the Occurrence of the Novel Pandemic COVID-19 Outbreak in Nigeria: A Box and Jenkins Approach

Subject Areas : International Journal of Mathematical Modelling & Computations

Nurudeen Ajadi ¹ , Isqeel Ogunsola ² , Saddam Damisa ³

1 - Department of Statistics, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta
2 - Department of Statistics, College of Physical science, Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria
3 - Department of Statistics, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria

Received: 2020-06-19 Accepted : 2020-09-05 Published : 2020-09-25

Keywords: Forecast, model, COVID-19, AIC, Log –likelihood,

Abstract :

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel pandemic disease that spreads very fast and causes severe respiratory problem to its carrier and thereby results to death in some cases. In this research, we studied the trend, model Nigeria daily COVID-19 cases and forecast for the future occurrences in the country at large. We adopt the Box and Jenkins approach. The time plot showed that the cases of COVID-19 rises rapidly in recent time. KPSS test confirms the non-stationarity of the process (p < 0.05) before differencing. The test also confirmed the stationarity of the process (p > 0.05) after differencing. Various ARIMA (p,d,q) were examined with their respective AICs and Log-likelihood. ARIMA (1, 2, 1) was selected as the best model due to its least AIC (559.74) and highest log likelihood (-276.87). Both Shapiro-Wilk test and Box test performed confirm the fitness of the model (p > 0.05) for the series. Forecast for 30 days was then made for COVID-19 cases in Nigeria. Conclusively, the model obtained in this research can be used to model, monitor and forecast the daily occurrence of COVID-19 cases in Nigeria.