Improving the precision of modeling the incidence of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome in mainland China with an ensemble machine learning approach.

Journal: PloS one
Published Date:

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS), one of the main public health concerns in mainland China, is a group of clinically similar diseases caused by hantaviruses. Statistical approaches have always been leveraged to forecast the future incidence rates of certain infectious diseases to effectively control their prevalence and outbreak potential. Compared to the use of one base model, model stacking can often produce better forecasting results. In this study, we fitted the monthly reported cases of HFRS in mainland China with a model stacking approach and compared its forecasting performance with those of five base models.

Authors

  • Guo-Hua Ye
    Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China.
  • Mirxat Alim
    Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China.
  • Peng Guan
    Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China.
  • De-Sheng Huang
    Department of Mathematics, School of Fundamental Sciences, China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China.
  • Bao-Sen Zhou
    Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China. bszhou@cmu.edu.cn.
  • Wei Wu
    Department of Pharmacy, The First Affiliated Hospital, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, China.