Forecasting Dengue Fever Incidence Using ARIMA Analysis

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 50 to 100 million infections occurs yearly, including 500,000 DHF cases and 22,000 deaths, mostly among children [6] In India, over the past decade, Dengue fever increased in frequency and in geographical extent [7]. Among them Kerala is one of the high risk states reporting more number of cases every year [7]. Since 2007, diagnosis and data assimilation for dengue and chikungunya in India have been facilitated by the National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP) [3]. Seasonal ARIMA models are usually denoted ARIMA (p, d, q) (P, D, Q)m, where m refers to the number of periods in each season, and the uppercase P, D, Q refer to the autoregressive, differencing, and moving average terms for the seasonal part of the ARIMA model. Department of Director of Public Health of Kerala state (http://dhs.kerala.gov.in/index.php/ publichealth) is providing annual reports of month wise incidence of communicable disease in Kerala state [9].