Jörg Simon Wicker Senior Lecturer | School of Computer Science | The University of Auckland
Senior Lecturer | School of Computer Science | The University of Auckland

A Novel Approach for Time Series Forecasting of Influenza-like Illness Using a Regression Chain Method

Nooriyan Poonawala-Lohani, Pat Riddle, Mehnaz Adnan, Jörg Wicker: A Novel Approach for Time Series Forecasting of Influenza-like Illness Using a Regression Chain Method. In: Altman, Russ; Dunker, Keith; Hunter, Lawrence; Ritchie, Marylyn; Murray, Tiffany; Klein, Teri (Ed.): Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, pp. 301-312, 2022.

Abstract

Influenza is a communicable respiratory illness that can cause serious public health hazards. Due to its huge threat to the community, accurate forecasting of Influenza-like-illness (ILI) can diminish the impact of an influenza season by enabling early public health interventions. Current forecasting models are limited in their performance, particularly when using a longer forecasting window. To support better forecasts over a longer forecasting window, we propose to use additional features such as weather data. Commonly used methods to fore-cast ILI, including statistical methods such as ARIMA, limit prediction performance when using additional data sources that might have complex non-linear associations with ILI incidence. This paper proposes a novel time series forecasting method, Randomized Ensembles of Auto-regression chains (Reach). Reach implements an ensemble of random chains for multi-step time series forecasting. This new approach is evaluated on ILI case counts in Auckland, New Zealand from the years 2015-2018 and compared to other standard methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performed better than baseline methods when applied to this multi-variate time series forecasting problem.

BibTeX (Download)

@inproceedings{poonawala-lohani2022novel,
title = {A Novel Approach for Time Series Forecasting of Influenza-like Illness Using a Regression Chain Method},
author = {Nooriyan Poonawala-Lohani and Pat Riddle and Mehnaz Adnan and J\"{o}rg Wicker},
editor = {Russ Altman and Keith Dunker and Lawrence Hunter and Marylyn Ritchie and Tiffany Murray and Teri Klein},
url = {https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811250477_0028
http://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/proceedings/psb22/poorawala-lohani.pdf},
doi = {10.1142/9789811250477_0028},
year  = {2022},
date = {2022-01-03},
urldate = {2022-01-03},
booktitle = {Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing},
volume = {27},
pages = {301-312},
abstract = {Influenza  is  a  communicable  respiratory  illness  that  can cause serious public health hazards. Due to its huge threat to the community, accurate forecasting of Influenza-like-illness (ILI) can diminish the impact of an influenza season by enabling early public health interventions.  Current  forecasting  models  are  limited  in  their  performance, particularly  when  using  a  longer  forecasting  window.  To  support  better forecasts over a longer forecasting window, we propose to use additional features such as weather data. Commonly used methods to fore-cast ILI, including statistical methods such as ARIMA, limit prediction performance when using additional data sources that might have complex  non-linear  associations  with  ILI  incidence.  This  paper  proposes  a novel time series forecasting method, Randomized Ensembles of Auto-regression chains (Reach). Reach implements an ensemble of random chains for multi-step time series forecasting. This new approach is evaluated on ILI case counts in Auckland, New Zealand from the years 2015-2018 and compared to other standard methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performed better than baseline methods when applied to this multi-variate time series forecasting problem.},
keywords = {computational sustainability, forecasting, influenza, machine learning, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}