Abstract
BackgroundScarlet fever is recognized as being a major public health issue owing to its increase in notifications in mainland China, and an advanced response based on forecasting techniques is being adopted to tackle this. Here, we construct a new hybrid method incorporating seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) with a nonlinear autoregressive with external input(NARX) to analyze its seasonality and trend in order to efficiently prevent and control this re-emerging disease.MethodsFour statistical models, including a basic SARIMA, basic nonlinear autoregressive (NAR) method, traditional SARIMA-NAR and new SARIMA-NARX hybrid approaches, were developed based on scarlet fever incidence data between January 2004 and July 2018 to evaluate its temporal patterns, and their mimic and predictive capacities were compared to discover the optimal using the mean absolute percentage error, root mean square error, mean error rate, and root mean square percentage error.ResultsThe four preferred models identified were comprised of the SARIMA(0,1,0)(0,1,1)12, NAR with 14 hidden neurons and five delays, SARIMA-NAR with 33 hidden neurons and five delays, and SARIMA-NARX with 16 hidden neurons and 4 delays. Among which presenting the lowest values of the aforementioned indices in both simulation and prediction horizons is the SARIMA-NARX method. Analyses from the data suggested that scarlet fever was a seasonal disease with predominant peaks of summer and winter and a substantial rising trend in the scarlet fever notifications was observed with an acceleration of 9.641% annually, particularly since 2011 with 12.869%, and moreover such a trend will be projected to continue in the coming year.ConclusionsThe SARIMA-NARX technique has the promising ability to better consider both linearity and non-linearity behind scarlet fever data than the others, which significantly facilitates its prevention and intervention of scarlet fever. Besides, under current trend of ongoing resurgence, specific strategies and countermeasures should be formulated to target scarlet fever.
Highlights
Scarlet fever is an acute respiratory contagious disease as a consequence of group A streptococcus pyogenes (GAS) infection (You et al, 2018)
Over the past decade, an exceptional upside in the morbidity of scarlet fever has occurred in some Asian and European countries and areas, containing mainland China (Liu et al, 2018), Vietnam (Andrey & Posfay-Barbe, 2016), Hong Kong (Luk et al, 2012), South Korea (Kim & Cheong, 2018), Australia (Feeney et al, 2005), Germany (Brockmann, Eichner & Eichner, 2018) and England (Lamagni et al, 2018). This worsening trend is becoming increasingly fierce, especially in China where the ongoing resurgence in disease morbidity has exerted a marked influence on Chinese population since 2011 and there still is a current scarcity of an available vaccine against scarlet fever (Lamagni et al, 2018; Liu et al, 2018; Walker & Brouwer, 2018; Wong & Yuen, 2018; Zhang et al, 2016a; Zhang et al, 2016b; Zhang & Liu, 2018)
No literature has proposed so far such a combined approach that integrated a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) and NARX depended on the time factor, seen as an extension of the SARIMA-nonlinear autoregressive (NAR), to identify the optimal method for predicting scarlet fever incidence; the desirable performance of the SARIMA-NARX combined method means the time driver can help to establish a greater degree of accuracy, and it should not be neglected in the forecasting process, which has provided a valuable insight into the domain of epidemiological prediction
Summary
Scarlet fever is an acute respiratory contagious disease as a consequence of group A streptococcus pyogenes (GAS) infection (You et al, 2018). Over the past decade, an exceptional upside in the morbidity of scarlet fever has occurred in some Asian and European countries and areas, containing mainland China (Liu et al, 2018), Vietnam (Andrey & Posfay-Barbe, 2016), Hong Kong (Luk et al, 2012), South Korea (Kim & Cheong, 2018), Australia (Feeney et al, 2005), Germany (Brockmann, Eichner & Eichner, 2018) and England (Lamagni et al, 2018) This worsening trend is becoming increasingly fierce, especially in China where the ongoing resurgence in disease morbidity has exerted a marked influence on Chinese population since 2011 and there still is a current scarcity of an available vaccine against scarlet fever (Lamagni et al, 2018; Liu et al, 2018; Walker & Brouwer, 2018; Wong & Yuen, 2018; Zhang et al, 2016a; Zhang et al, 2016b; Zhang & Liu, 2018). Under current trend of ongoing resurgence, specific strategies and countermeasures should be formulated to target scarlet fever
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