Where and when: Thursday, Oct 21 at 2-3pm in Google Meets (see the calendar invitation for the link)

Speaker: Johnny Zhu, supervised by Joerg Wicker and Gill Dobbie

Abstract: Covid-19 has been raging around the world for more than 20 months. The epidemic has occurred repeatedly in many countries, including New Zealand, also known as multiple epidemic waves or subepidemics. Data scientists have been trying to simulate and predict the COVID epidemic, but very few studies have focused on understanding the mechanism of multiple epidemic waves and how to predict the arrival of the next wave of epidemics. My research attempts to use modified SEIR models, differential equation identification, ARIMA, and random forest models to simulate multi-wave epidemics, and try to answer the research questions, namely what causes multi-wave epidemics, and how to predict the arrival of the next wave. In this seminar, I will share the difficulties encountered during my study, and hoping to get inspiration from everyone’s discussion.