IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jijerp/v17y2020i4p1381-d323329.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Forecasting Flu Activity in the United States: Benchmarking an Endemic-Epidemic Beta Model

Author

Listed:
  • Junyi Lu

    (Institute of Medical Informatics, Biometry, and Epidemiology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91054 Erlangen, Germany)

  • Sebastian Meyer

    (Institute of Medical Informatics, Biometry, and Epidemiology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91054 Erlangen, Germany)

Abstract

Accurate prediction of flu activity enables health officials to plan disease prevention and allocate treatment resources. A promising forecasting approach is to adapt the well-established endemic-epidemic modeling framework to time series of infectious disease proportions. Using U.S. influenza-like illness surveillance data over 18 seasons, we assessed probabilistic forecasts of this new beta autoregressive model with proper scoring rules. Other readily available forecasting tools were used for comparison, including Prophet, (S)ARIMA and kernel conditional density estimation (KCDE). Short-term flu activity was equally well predicted up to four weeks ahead by the beta model with four autoregressive lags and by KCDE; however, the beta model runs much faster. Non-dynamic Prophet scored worst. Relative performance differed for seasonal peak prediction. Prophet produced the best peak intensity forecasts in seasons with standard epidemic curves; otherwise, KCDE outperformed all other methods. Peak timing was best predicted by SARIMA, KCDE or the beta model, depending on the season. The best overall performance when predicting peak timing and intensity was achieved by KCDE. Only KCDE and naive historical forecasts consistently outperformed the equal-bin reference approach for all test seasons. We conclude that the endemic-epidemic beta model is a performant and easy-to-implement tool to forecast flu activity a few weeks ahead. Real-time forecasting of the seasonal peak, however, should consider outputs of multiple models simultaneously, weighing their usefulness as the season progresses.

Suggested Citation

  • Junyi Lu & Sebastian Meyer, 2020. "Forecasting Flu Activity in the United States: Benchmarking an Endemic-Epidemic Beta Model," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(4), pages 1-13, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:4:p:1381-:d:323329
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/4/1381/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/4/1381/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Evan L Ray & Nicholas G Reich, 2018. "Prediction of infectious disease epidemics via weighted density ensembles," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(2), pages 1-23, February.
    2. Hyndman, Rob J. & Khandakar, Yeasmin, 2008. "Automatic Time Series Forecasting: The forecast Package for R," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 27(i03).
    3. Sean J. Taylor & Benjamin Letham, 2018. "Forecasting at Scale," The American Statistician, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 72(1), pages 37-45, January.
    4. Logan C Brooks & David C Farrow & Sangwon Hyun & Ryan J Tibshirani & Roni Rosenfeld, 2015. "Flexible Modeling of Epidemics with an Empirical Bayes Framework," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(8), pages 1-18, August.
    5. Spyros Makridakis & Evangelos Spiliotis & Vassilios Assimakopoulos, 2018. "Statistical and Machine Learning forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(3), pages 1-26, March.
    6. Sebastian Funk & Anton Camacho & Adam J Kucharski & Rachel Lowe & Rosalind M Eggo & W John Edmunds, 2019. "Assessing the performance of real-time epidemic forecasts: A case study of Ebola in the Western Area region of Sierra Leone, 2014-15," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(2), pages 1-17, February.
    7. Tilmann Gneiting & Fadoua Balabdaoui & Adrian E. Raftery, 2007. "Probabilistic forecasts, calibration and sharpness," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 69(2), pages 243-268, April.
    8. Gneiting, Tilmann & Raftery, Adrian E., 2007. "Strictly Proper Scoring Rules, Prediction, and Estimation," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 102, pages 359-378, March.
    9. Logan C Brooks & David C Farrow & Sangwon Hyun & Ryan J Tibshirani & Roni Rosenfeld, 2018. "Nonmechanistic forecasts of seasonal influenza with iterative one-week-ahead distributions," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(6), pages 1-29, June.
    10. Dunsmuir, William T. M. & Scott, David J., 2015. "The glarma Package for Observation-Driven Time Series Regression of Counts," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 67(i07).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zhijuan Song & Xiaocan Jia & Junzhe Bao & Yongli Yang & Huili Zhu & Xuezhong Shi, 2021. "Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Influenza-Like Illness and Prediction of Incidence in High-Risk Regions in the United States from 2011 to 2020," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(13), pages 1-14, July.
    2. Scher, Vinícius T. & Cribari-Neto, Francisco & Bayer, Fábio M., 2024. "Generalized βARMA model for double bounded time series forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 721-734.
    3. Tian-Shyug Lee & I-Fei Chen & Ting-Jen Chang & Chi-Jie Lu, 2020. "Forecasting Weekly Influenza Outpatient Visits Using a Two-Dimensional Hierarchical Decision Tree Scheme," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(13), pages 1-15, July.
    4. Zixiao Luo & Xiaocan Jia & Junzhe Bao & Zhijuan Song & Huili Zhu & Mengying Liu & Yongli Yang & Xuezhong Shi, 2022. "A Combined Model of SARIMA and Prophet Models in Forecasting AIDS Incidence in Henan Province, China," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(10), pages 1-12, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ray, Evan L. & Brooks, Logan C. & Bien, Jacob & Biggerstaff, Matthew & Bosse, Nikos I. & Bracher, Johannes & Cramer, Estee Y. & Funk, Sebastian & Gerding, Aaron & Johansson, Michael A. & Rumack, Aaron, 2023. "Comparing trained and untrained probabilistic ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 1366-1383.
    2. Arthur Novaes de Amorim & Rob Deardon & Vineet Saini, 2021. "A stacked ensemble method for forecasting influenza-like illness visit volumes at emergency departments," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(3), pages 1-15, March.
    3. Petropoulos, Fotios & Apiletti, Daniele & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios & Babai, Mohamed Zied & Barrow, Devon K. & Ben Taieb, Souhaib & Bergmeir, Christoph & Bessa, Ricardo J. & Bijak, Jakub & Boylan, Joh, 2022. "Forecasting: theory and practice," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 705-871.
      • Fotios Petropoulos & Daniele Apiletti & Vassilios Assimakopoulos & Mohamed Zied Babai & Devon K. Barrow & Souhaib Ben Taieb & Christoph Bergmeir & Ricardo J. Bessa & Jakub Bijak & John E. Boylan & Jet, 2020. "Forecasting: theory and practice," Papers 2012.03854, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2022.
    4. Miroslav Navratil & Andrea Kolkova, 2019. "Decomposition and Forecasting Time Series in the Business Economy Using Prophet Forecasting Model," Central European Business Review, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2019(4), pages 26-39.
    5. Song, Haiyan & Wen, Long & Liu, Chang, 2019. "Density tourism demand forecasting revisited," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 379-392.
    6. Makridakis, Spyros & Spiliotis, Evangelos & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios & Chen, Zhi & Gaba, Anil & Tsetlin, Ilia & Winkler, Robert L., 2022. "The M5 uncertainty competition: Results, findings and conclusions," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 1365-1385.
    7. Makridakis, Spyros & Hyndman, Rob J. & Petropoulos, Fotios, 2020. "Forecasting in social settings: The state of the art," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 15-28.
    8. Makridakis, Spyros & Spiliotis, Evangelos & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2020. "The M4 Competition: 100,000 time series and 61 forecasting methods," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 54-74.
    9. Gonca Gürses-Tran & Antonello Monti, 2022. "Advances in Time Series Forecasting Development for Power Systems’ Operation with MLOps," Forecasting, MDPI, vol. 4(2), pages 1-24, May.
    10. Nicholas G Reich & Craig J McGowan & Teresa K Yamana & Abhinav Tushar & Evan L Ray & Dave Osthus & Sasikiran Kandula & Logan C Brooks & Willow Crawford-Crudell & Graham Casey Gibson & Evan Moore & Reb, 2019. "Accuracy of real-time multi-model ensemble forecasts for seasonal influenza in the U.S," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(11), pages 1-19, November.
    11. Arrieta-Prieto, Mario & Schell, Kristen R., 2022. "Spatio-temporal probabilistic forecasting of wind power for multiple farms: A copula-based hybrid model," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 300-320.
    12. Felix Divo & Eric Endress & Kevin Endler & Kristian Kersting & Devendra Singh Dhami, 2024. "Forecasting Company Fundamentals," Papers 2411.05791, arXiv.org.
    13. Rajapaksha, Dilini & Bergmeir, Christoph & Hyndman, Rob J., 2023. "LoMEF: A framework to produce local explanations for global model time series forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 1424-1447.
    14. Posch, Konstantin & Truden, Christian & Hungerländer, Philipp & Pilz, Jürgen, 2022. "A Bayesian approach for predicting food and beverage sales in staff canteens and restaurants," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 321-338.
    15. Warne, Anders, 2023. "DSGE model forecasting: rational expectations vs. adaptive learning," Working Paper Series 2768, European Central Bank.
    16. Hewamalage, Hansika & Bergmeir, Christoph & Bandara, Kasun, 2021. "Recurrent Neural Networks for Time Series Forecasting: Current status and future directions," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 388-427.
    17. Sasikiran Kandula & Jeffrey Shaman, 2019. "Reappraising the utility of Google Flu Trends," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(8), pages 1-16, August.
    18. Lahiri, Kajal & Yang, Liu, 2013. "Forecasting Binary Outcomes," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1025-1106, Elsevier.
    19. Jenny Brynjarsdottir & Jonathan Hobbs & Amy Braverman & Lukas Mandrake, 2018. "Optimal Estimation Versus MCMC for $$\mathrm{{CO}}_{2}$$ CO 2 Retrievals," Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics, Springer;The International Biometric Society;American Statistical Association, vol. 23(2), pages 297-316, June.
    20. Spiliotis, Evangelos & Makridakis, Spyros & Kaltsounis, Anastasios & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2021. "Product sales probabilistic forecasting: An empirical evaluation using the M5 competition data," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 240(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:4:p:1381-:d:323329. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.