Artificial Intelligence Approach for Severe Dengue Early Warning System

Dengue fever is a viral infectious disease transmitted through mosquito bites, and has symptoms ranging from mild flu-like symptoms to deadly complications. Dengue fever is one of the global burden diseases which annually have 50-100 million cases with 500,000 cases of severe dengue fever, of which 22,000 deaths occur mostly in children. Despite the discovery of vaccines, vector control is still the main approach for prevention efforts. Early detection and accessibility to medical care can reduce severe Dengue mortality rate from 50% to 2%. In the previous study, both statistical and machine learning methods have the potential for predicting a Dengue outbreak, but the study is still fragmented and limited on implementing the generated model into an early warning system application. In this study, we developed an artificial intelligence model with spatiotemporal to predict Dengue outbreak and Dengue incidence case which is ready to be implemented into an early warning system application. Indonesia, especially Semarang City, has experienced an endemic Dengue. We used Semarang City spatiotemporal, meteorological, climatological, and Dengue surveillance epidemiology data from January 2014 to December 2021 in 16 districts of Semarang City. We reviewed 7208 samples from 16 districts and 1 city per week during 8 years. The entire dataset was divided into training (80%) and testing (20%) to develop a prediction model. We used machine learning and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) to predict Dengue outbreak 1 week before the event for each district. and machine learning to predict Dengue incident cases 1 week before the event for each district. Accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), precision, recall, and F1 score were considered to evaluate the Dengue outbreak prediction model. The Dengue incidence cases prediction model will evaluate using Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and R-Squared (R2). Extra Trees Classifier model shown outperform in Dengue outbreak prediction, with accuracy 0.8925, AUROC 0. 9529, Recall 0.6117, precision 0.8880, and F1 score 0.7238. CatBoost Regressor model is shown to outperform in Dengue incidence cases prediction, with R2 0.5621, MAE 0.6304, MSE 1.1997, and RMSE 1.0891. The study proves that Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a spatiotemporal approach can give higher performance in Dengue outbreak and incidence cases prediction. Utilization of AI approaches that are sensitive with spatiotemporal feasibility to implement in Dengue early warning system application may contribute to increase the policy makers and community attention to do accurate community-based vector control. © 2024 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and IOS Press.