Abstract:
The seasonal epidemic of influenza costs thousands
of lives each year in the US. While influenza
epidemics occur every year, timing and size of the
epidemic vary strongly from season to season.
This complicates the public health efforts to adequately
respond to such epidemics. Forecasting
techniques to predict the development of seasonal
epidemics such as influenza, are of great help to
public health decision making. Therefore, the
US Center for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) has initiated a yearly challenge to forecast
influenza-like illness. Here, we propose a
new framework based on Gaussian process (GP)
for seasonal epidemics forecasting and demonstrate
its capability on the CDC reference data
on influenza like illness: our framework leads to
accurate forecasts with small but reliable uncertainty
estimation. We compare our framework
to several state of the art benchmarks and show
competitive performance. We, therefore, believe
that our GP based framework for seasonal epidemics
forecasting will play a key role for future
influenza forecasting and, lead to further research
in the area.