Statistical Forecasting : Third Wave of COVID-19-With an Application to India

The pandemic due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus impacted the entire world in different waves. An important question that arise after witnessing the first and second waves of COVID-19 is - Will the third wave also arrive and if yes, then when. Various types of methodologies are being used to explore the arrival of third wave. A statistical methodology based on the fitting of mixture of Gaussian distributions is explored in this paper and the aim is to forecast the third wave using the data on the first two waves of pandemic. Utilizing the data of different countries that are already facing the third wave, modelling of their daily cases data and predicting the impact and timeline for the third wave in India is attempted in this paper. The Gaussian mixture model based on algorithm for clustering is used to estimate the parameters.