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Forecasting dengue and influenza incidences using a sparse representation of Google trends, electronic health records, and time series data

tetano

Editor, Senior Moderator
PLoS Comput Biol. 2019 Nov 21;15(11):e1007518. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007518. [Epub ahead of print] [h=1]Forecasting dengue and influenza incidences using a sparse representation of Google trends, electronic health records, and time series data.[/h]
Rangarajan P[SUP]1[/SUP], Mody SK[SUP]2[/SUP], Marathe M[SUP]3[/SUP].
[h=3]Author information[/h] 1 Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. 2 Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. 3 Department of Computer Science, Network, Simulation Science and Advanced Computing Division, Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America.

[h=3]Abstract[/h] Dengue and influenza-like illness (ILI) are two of the leading causes of viral infection in the world and it is estimated that more than half the world's population is at risk for developing these infections. It is therefore important to develop accurate methods for forecasting dengue and ILI incidences. Since data from multiple sources (such as dengue and ILI case counts, electronic health records and frequency of multiple internet search terms from Google Trends) can improve forecasts, standard time series analysis methods are inadequate to estimate all the parameter values from the limited amount of data available if we use multiple sources. In this paper, we use a computationally efficient implementation of the known variable selection method that we call the Autoregressive Likelihood Ratio (ARLR) method. This method combines sparse representation of time series data, electronic health records data (for ILI) and Google Trends data to forecast dengue and ILI incidences. This sparse representation method uses an algorithm that maximizes an appropriate likelihood ratio at every step. Using numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our method recovers the underlying sparse model much more accurately than the lasso method. We apply our method to dengue case count data from five countries/states: Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand and to ILI case count data from the United States. Numerical experiments show that our method outperforms existing time series forecasting methods in forecasting the dengue and ILI case counts. In particular, our method gives a 18 percent forecast error reduction over a leading method that also uses data from multiple sources. It also performs better than other methods in predicting the peak value of the case count and the peak time.


PMID: 31751346 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007518
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