GA-Optimized Multivariate CNN-LSTM Model for Predicting Multi-channel Mobility in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The primary factor that contributes to the transmission of COVID-19 infection is human mobility. Positive instances added on a daily basis have a substantial positive association with the pace of human mobility, and the reverse is true. Thus, having the ability to predict human mobility trend during a pandemic is critical for policymakers to help in decreasing the rate of transmission in the future. In this regard, one approach that is commonly used for time-series data prediction is to build an ensemble with the aim of getting the best performance. However, building an ensemble often causes the performance of the model to decrease, due to the increasing number of parameters that are not being optimized properly. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate a deep learning ensemble model, which is optimized using a genetic algorithm (GA) that incorporates a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a long short-term memory (LSTM). A CNN is used to conduct feature extraction from mobility time-series data, while an LSTM is used to do mobility prediction. The parameters of both layers are adjusted using GA. As a result of the experiments conducted with data from the Google Community Mobility Reports in Indonesia that ranges from the beginning of February 2020 to the end of December 2020, the GA-Optimized Multivariate CNN-LSTM ensemble outperforms stand-alone CNN and LSTM models, as well as the non-optimized CNN-LSTM model, in terms of predicting human movement in the future. This may be useful in assisting policymakers in anticipating future human mobility trends.