Prediction of COVID-19 Time Series – Case Studies of South Africa and Egypt using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic System

COVID-19 is a virus known to emanate from Wuhan, China in December 2019. COVID-19 spread widely to nearby countries like Japan and Korea, followed by Europe and America and later to Africa. Particularly, South Africa and Egypt have been worst hit by the virus. Generally, the COVID-19 data is highly uncertain and requires fuzzy logic approaches for the effective handling of these uncertainties. This study therefore presents the prediction of COVID-19 cases in South Africa and Egypt using interval type-2 fuzzy logic system with Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy inference and neural network learning. The parameters of the model are adapted using gradient descent backpropagation approach. The proposed model is found to outperform type-1 fuzzy logic system and artificial neural network in terms of the root mean squared error, mean absolute percentage error and mean absolute error.