Integer-valued functional data analysis for measles forecasting

DOI10.1111/BIOM.13110zbMATH Open1448.62174arXiv1902.07788OpenAlexW2954819394WikidataQ93120119 ScholiaQ93120119MaRDI QIDQ5121049FDOQ5121049

Authors: Daniel R. Kowal 

Publication date: 16 September 2020

Published in: Biometrics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Measles presents a unique and imminent challenge for epidemiologists and public health officials: the disease is highly contagious, yet vaccination rates are declining precipitously in many localities. Consequently, the risk of a measles outbreak continues to rise. To improve preparedness, we study historical measles data both pre- and post-vaccine, and design new methodology to forecast measles counts with uncertainty quantification. We propose to model the disease counts as an integer-valued functional time series: measles counts are a function of time-of-year and time-ordered by year. The counts are modeled using a negative-binomial distribution conditional on a real-valued latent process, which accounts for the overdispersion observed in the data. The latent process is decomposed using an unknown basis expansion, which is learned from the data, with dynamic basis coefficients. The resulting framework provides enhanced capability to model complex seasonality, which varies dynamically from year-to-year, and offers improved multi-month ahead point forecasts and substantially tighter forecast intervals (with correct coverage) compared to existing forecasting models. Importantly, the fully Bayesian approach provides well-calibrated and precise uncertainty quantification for epi-relevent features, such as the future value and time of the peak measles count in a given year. An R package is available online.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.07788

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zbMATH Keywords

predictionMCMCtime seriesBayesian modelingdiseasepublic health

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Time series, auto-correlation, regression, etc. in statistics (GARCH) (62M10) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Medical epidemiology (92C60) Inference from stochastic processes and prediction (62M20) Functional data analysis (62R10)

Cited In (4)

• Functional Bayesian networks for discovering causality from multivariate functional data
• Bayesian Function-on-Scalars Regression for High-Dimensional Data
• Dynamic regression models for time-ordered functional data
• Simultaneous transformation and rounding (STAR) models for integer-valued data

Uses Software

• R

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