A convolution neural network integrating climate variables and spatial-temporal properties to predict influenza trends

Abstract

The spread of influenza is contingent upon a multitude of outbreak-related factors, including viral mutation, climate conditions, acquisition of immunity, crowded environments, vaccine efficacy, social gatherings, and the health and age profiles of individuals in contact with infected individuals. An epidemic in the region impacted by spatial transmission risk from adjacent regions. A few influenzas epidemic models start highlighting the spatial correlations between influenza patients and geographically adjacent regions. The proposed model is based on the concept of climatic, immunization, and spatial correlations which are represented by a convolution neural network (CNN) for influenza epidemic forecasting. This study presents an integration of three determinants for predicting influenza outbreaks, multivariate climate data, spatial data on influenza vaccination, and spatial-temporal data of historical influenza patients. The performance of three comparison models, CNN, recurrent neural network (RNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) was compared by the root mean squared error metric (RMSE). The findings revealed that the CNN model represents human interaction at intervals of 12, 16, 20, 24, and 28 weeks resulting in the best effectiveness of the lowest RMSE=0.00376 with learning rate=0.0001.