Machine learning forecasts for seasonal epidemic peaks: Lessons learnt from an atypical respiratory syncytial virus season.
Journal
PloS one
ISSN: 1932-6203
Titre abrégé: PLoS One
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 101285081
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
2023
2023
Historique:
received:
12
01
2023
accepted:
10
09
2023
medline:
25
9
2023
pubmed:
22
9
2023
entrez:
22
9
2023
Statut:
epublish
Résumé
Seasonal peaks in infectious disease incidence put pressures on health services. Therefore, early warning of the timing and magnitude of peak activity during seasonal epidemics can provide information for public health practitioners to take appropriate action. Whilst many infectious diseases have predictable seasonality, newly emerging diseases and the impact of public health interventions can result in unprecedented seasonal activity. We propose a Machine Learning process for generating short-term forecasts, where models are selected based on their ability to correctly forecast peaks in activity, and can be useful during atypical seasons. We have validated our forecasts using typical and atypical seasonal activity, using respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) activity during 2019-2021 as an example. During the winter of 2020/21 the usual winter peak in RSV activity in England did not occur but was 'deferred' until the Spring of 2021. We compare a range of Machine Learning regression models, with alternate models including different independent variables, e.g. with or without seasonality or trend variables. We show that the best-fitting model which minimises daily forecast errors is not the best model for forecasting peaks when the selection criterion is based on peak timing and magnitude. Furthermore, we show that best-fitting models for typical seasons contain different variables to those for atypical seasons. Specifically, including seasonality in models improves performance during typical seasons but worsens it for the atypical seasons.
Identifiants
pubmed: 37738241
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291932
pii: PONE-D-22-35171
pmc: PMC10516409
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
e0291932Informations de copyright
Copyright: © 2023 Morbey et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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