Introduction The National Science and Technology Council, within the Executive Office of the President, established the Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology (PPFST) Working Group in 2013. The PPFST Working Group supports the US Predict the Next Pandemic Initiative, and serves as a forum to accelerate the development of federal infectious disease outbreak prediction and for...

There is a long tradition of using mathematical models to generate insights into the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases and assess the potential impact of different intervention strategies. The increasing use of mathematical models for epidemic forecasting has highlighted the importance of designing reliable models that capture the baseline transmission characteristics of specific pat...

BACKGROUND Cases of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) are widely distributed in eastern Asia, especially in China, Russia, and Korea. It is proved to be a difficult task to eliminate HFRS completely because of the diverse animal reservoirs and effects of global warming. Reliable forecasting is useful for the prevention and control of HFRS. METHODS Two hybrid models, one composed of...

Every year between one and two million African children under five die of malaria. If one adds to this the contribution of malaria to all-cause infant mortality then clearly the burden of the disease is catastrophic--a disaster quietly happening each and every year. New tools are needed urgently to support those currently available for control of the disease. An effective vaccine remains elusiv...

Echinococcosis, which can seriously harm human health and animal husbandry production, has become an endemic in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. In order to explore an effective human Echinococcosis forecasting model in Xinjiang, three grey models, namely, the traditional grey GM(1,1) model, the Grey-Periodic Extensional Combinatorial Model (PECGM(1,1)), and the Modified Grey Mode...

Botnets are considered to be among the biggest current threats to global IT infrastructure. Botnets are rapidly evolving and forecasting their survivability and propagation strategies is important for development of countermeasure techniques. Existing malware propagation models mainly concentrate on malware epidemic consequences modeling, i.e. forecasting the number of infected computers, simul...

This study was designed to examine the performance of a nonparametric forecasting method first developed in meteorology, the "method of analogues," in predicting influenza activity. This method uses vectors selected from historical influenza time series that match current activity. The authors applied it to forecasting the incidences of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) in France and in the countr...

Internet worms remain one of the major threats to the Internet infrastructure. Modeling allows forecasting the malware propagation consequences and evolution trends, planning countermeasures and many other tasks that cannot be investigated without harm to production systems in the wild. Existing malware propagation models mainly concentrate on malware epidemic consequences modeling, i.e. foreca...