Contact patterns in populations fundamentally influence the spread of infectious diseases. Current mathematical methods for epidemiological forecasting on networks largely assume that contacts between individuals are fixed, at least for the duration of an outbreak. In reality, contact patterns may be quite fluid, with individuals frequently making and breaking social or sexual relationships. He...

Rapidly increasing volumes of news, tweets, and blogs are proving to be extremely valuable resources in helping anticipate, detect, and forecast significant societal events. In this paper, we focus on the problem of forecasting rare disease outbreaks and demonstrate how spatio-temporal topic models over health-related newspaper articles can successfully be used to forecast outbreaks. More preci...

Public health surveillance systems provide valuable data for reliable predication of future epidemic events. This paper describes a study that used nine types of infectious disease data collected through a national public health surveillance system in mainland China to evaluate and compare the performances of four time series methods, namely, two decomposition methods (regression and exponentia...

WHO reacts to countries' immediate needs and initiates sustainable measures such as the development of laboratory networks and active surveillance systems. Photo credit: WHO The regional strategy for communicable disease surveillance, forecasting and response depend s on national, regional and global surveillance and containment plans for emerging and re-emerging disease threats. The main strat...

Mathematical models are often regarded as recent innovations in the description and analysis of infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics, but simple models have been in use for projection of epidemic trajectories for more than a century. We recently described a single equation model (the incidence decay with exponential adjustment, or IDEA, model) that can be used for short term forecasting. ...

In recent years, many studies have been done on forecasting fuzzy time series. First-order fuzzy time series forecasting methods with first-order lagged variables and high-order fuzzy time series forecasting methods with consecutive lagged variables constitute the considerable part of these studies. However, these methods are not effective in forecasting fuzzy time series which contain seasonal...

Goebel et al. [4] presented a unified decomposition of ensemble loss for explaining ensemble performance. They considered democratic voting schemes with uniform weights, where the various base classifiers each can vote for a single class once only. In this article, we generalize their decomposition to cover weighted, probabilistic voting schemes and non-uniform (progressive) voting schemes. Emp...