City-Wide Influenza Forecasting based on Multi-Source Data

Seasonal influenza epidemics which annually cause substantial diseases and deaths in high-risk population groups are a major public health concern around the world. Considering the hysteresis of traditional flu surveillance systems, this work aims to present a methodology capable of forecasting influenza activity of a city in China precisely 1 week ahead of the official publication. To that end, exogenous information collected from different sources were separately tested with historical influenza-like illness reports for the ability of detecting influenza activity, including climate surveillance, Internet users' search activity, twitter and health inquiry on an online health consultation platform. Moreover, an ensemble model combining a time series analysis model and a tree boosting model based on those multisource data was applied to improve the accuracy and generalizability of influenza forecasting, in which a model fusion method based on the Kalman Filter was proposed. The validation experiments in this work were performed on the influenza-like illness reports collected from Chongqing city over 4 influenza seasons within 2014-2017. The results show that the proposed model outperformed other tested models by not only taking the periodic law of influenza into consideration but also incorporating information from diverse data sources. The mean absolute percentage error of the validation data set decreased to about 10%. This work provides a viable suggestion for improving the influenza activity forecasting of a city at its early stage.