Multi-Model Selection and Analysis for COVID-19

In the face of an increasing number of COVID-19 infections, one of the most crucial and challenging problems is to pick out the most reasonable and reliable models. Based on the COVID-19 data of four typical cities/provinces in China, integer-order and fractional SIR, SEIR, SEIR-Q, SEIR-QD, and SEIR-AHQ models are systematically analyzed by the AICc, BIC, RMSE, and R means. Through extensive simulation and comprehensive comparison, we show that the fractional models perform much better than the corresponding integer-order models in representing the epidemiological information contained in the real data. It is further revealed that the inflection point plays a vital role in the prediction. Moreover, the basic reproduction numbers R0 of all models are highly dependent on the contact rate.