Weeks-Ahead Epidemiological Predictions of Varicella Cases From Univariate Time Series Data Applying Artificial Intelligence.

Background: "Chickenpox" is a highly infectious disease caused by the varicella-zoster virus, influenced by seasonal and spatial factors. Dealing with varicella-zoster epidemics can be a substantial drain on health-authority resources. Methods that improve the ability to locally predict case numbers from time-series data sets every week are therefore worth developing. Methods: Simple-to-extract trend attributes from published univariate weekly case-number univariate data sets were used to generate multivariate data for Hungary covering 10 years. That attribute-enhanced data set was assessed by machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to generate weekly case forecasts from next week (t0) to 12 weeks forward (t+12). The ML and DL predictions were compared with those generated by multilinear regression and univariate prediction methods. Results: Support vector regression generates the best predictions for weeks t0 and t+1, whereas extreme gradient boosting generates the best predictions for weeks t+3 to t+12. Long-short-term memory only provides comparable prediction accuracy to the ML models for week t+12. Multi-K-fold cross validation reveals that overall the lowest prediction uncertainty is associated with the tree-ensemble ML models. Conclusion: The novel trend-attribute method offers the potential to reduce prediction errors and improve transparency for chickenpox time series.