Paper ID: 2404.08893

Early detection of disease outbreaks and non-outbreaks using incidence data

Shan Gao, Amit K. Chakraborty, Russell Greiner, Mark A. Lewis, Hao Wang

Forecasting the occurrence and absence of novel disease outbreaks is essential for disease management. Here, we develop a general model, with no real-world training data, that accurately forecasts outbreaks and non-outbreaks. We propose a novel framework, using a feature-based time series classification method to forecast outbreaks and non-outbreaks. We tested our methods on synthetic data from a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model for slowly changing, noisy disease dynamics. Outbreak sequences give a transcritical bifurcation within a specified future time window, whereas non-outbreak (null bifurcation) sequences do not. We identified incipient differences in time series of infectives leading to future outbreaks and non-outbreaks. These differences are reflected in 22 statistical features and 5 early warning signal indicators. Classifier performance, given by the area under the receiver-operating curve, ranged from 0.99 for large expanding windows of training data to 0.7 for small rolling windows. Real-world performances of classifiers were tested on two empirical datasets, COVID-19 data from Singapore and SARS data from Hong Kong, with two classifiers exhibiting high accuracy. In summary, we showed that there are statistical features that distinguish outbreak and non-outbreak sequences long before outbreaks occur. We could detect these differences in synthetic and real-world data sets, well before potential outbreaks occur.

Submitted: Apr 13, 2024