{"id":111434,"date":"2020-07-29T16:48:23","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T20:48:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=111434"},"modified":"2020-09-30T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T14:00:00","slug":"covid-19-cases-to-decline-beginning-next-month-ucf-research-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/covid-19-cases-to-decline-beginning-next-month-ucf-research-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 Cases to Decline Beginning Next Month, UCF Research Predicts"},"content":{"rendered":"

COVID-19 infection rates<\/a> may be peaking in Orange County later this month and trending down toward December, according to new projections by data scientists at the University of Central Florida.<\/p>\n

The researchers from the Departments of Statistics and Data Science<\/a> and Computer Science<\/a> caution, however, that their projections \u2014 built using the latest artificial intelligence and deep-learning models<\/a> \u2014 don\u2019t account for variables like the NBA relocating to Orlando, schools reopening in August or tourists visiting Orange County.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe current predictions are based on the data to date, and the future may change,\u201d says Shunpu Zhang, professor and chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science, who worked on the project along with Associate Professor of Computer Science Liqiang Wang and graduate student Dongdong Wang.<\/p>\n

The trio developed the projections by feeding data from Johns Hopkins University and Th<\/em>e New York Times<\/em> into 10 different compartmental models informed by 10 deep neural networks. Each deep neural network was trained with about 50,000 simulations from classic epidemic mechanistic models, including SIR and SEIR, both widely accepted by epidemiologists. The resulting models include the variables to help policy makers see the best-case and worst-case scenarios.<\/p>\n

Based on the observation data available through July 22, those scenarios include:<\/p>\n