The recent epidemic coronavirus creates uncertainties in the global health community, and it is challenging to communicate potential risks to the general public and public health professionals. With that in mind, and motivated by the fact that current prediction models are currently only circulating in the research community, we wanted to come up with a project that could help users around the world have access to a level of prediction data. We came up with a couple of goals that we wanted our project to eventually achieve:
Create an interactive user interface and comprehensive visualizations to make information about coronavirus easily digestible for the general public
Predict potential health risks and business risks in the future and support data-driven decision making among professionals
Provide policy makers and health professionals with reliable information regarding the future spread of coronavirus and help them take proactive measures
The first aspect that we wanted to come up with was a tool that uses modeling to form a prediction for the coronavirus' spread over time. We did that using tools such as Facebook's Prophet library. We built the application by playing on our strengths; some of us focused on project management or the back end, while others worked toward refining the model used, researching methods to achieve our goal, or design the interactive map feature that is the first phase we were able to deploy during the course of this event.
Our primary challenge was related to a small dataset. The virus hasn't been public for a long time, and data sets aren't as mature as a result. We're confident that as more mature data is published, our model will work better.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.