A Multi-Stage Machine Learning Approach to Predict Dengue Incidence: A Case Study in Mexico

The mosquito-borne dengue fever is a major public health problem in tropical countries, where it is strongly conditioned by climate factors such as temperature. In this paper, we formulate a holistic machine learning strategy to analyze the temporal dynamics of temperature and dengue data and use this knowledge to produce accurate predictions of dengue, based on temperature on an annual scale. The temporal dynamics are extracted from historical data by utilizing a novel multi-stage combination of auto-encoding, window-based data representation and trend-based temporal clustering. The prediction is performed with a trend association-based nearest neighbour predictor. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is evaluated in a case study that comprises the number of dengue and dengue hemorrhagic fever cases collected over the period 1985-2010 in 32 federal states of Mexico. The empirical study proves the viability of the proposed strategy and confirms that it outperforms various state-of-the-art competitor methods formulated both in regression and in time series forecasting analysis.