A Data Mining Approach to Identify Climatic Determinants of Dengue Fever Patterns in French Guiana

We applied sequential pattern extraction to identify the most important climatic factors related to dengue fever in French Guiana. Our findings suggest that the local climate has major effects on the occurrence of dengue epidemics in French Guiana and highlight the utility of the data mining approach to analyze disease surveillance data on a temporal and a spatial scale in relation to climatic, social and environmental variables. This study is a first step of a data mining project which will help to better understand and accurately predict temporal dynamics of dengue fever in French Guiana.