Back to Search
Start Over
Epidemic Forecasting is Messier Than Weather Forecasting: The Role of Human Behavior and Internet Data Streams in Epidemic Forecast
- Source :
- Journal of Infectious Diseases. 214:S404-S408
- Publication Year :
- 2016
- Publisher :
- Oxford University Press (OUP), 2016.
-
Abstract
- Mathematical models, such as those that forecast the spread of epidemics or predict the weather, must overcome the challenges of integrating incomplete and inaccurate data in computer simulations, estimating the probability of multiple possible scenarios, incorporating changes in human behavior and/or the pathogen, and environmental factors. In the past 3 decades, the weather forecasting community has made significant advances in data collection, assimilating heterogeneous data steams into models and communicating the uncertainty of their predictions to the general public. Epidemic modelers are struggling with these same issues in forecasting the spread of emerging diseases, such as Zika virus infection and Ebola virus disease. While weather models rely on physical systems, data from satellites, and weather stations, epidemic models rely on human interactions, multiple data sources such as clinical surveillance and Internet data, and environmental or biological factors that can change the pathogen dynamics. We describe some of similarities and differences between these 2 fields and how the epidemic modeling community is rising to the challenges posed by forecasting to help anticipate and guide the mitigation of epidemics. We conclude that some of the fundamental differences between these 2 fields, such as human behavior, make disease forecasting more challenging than weather forecasting.
- Subjects :
- 0301 basic medicine
Computer science
Weather forecasting
Information Storage and Retrieval
computer.software_genre
Communicable Diseases
Messier object
Zika virus
03 medical and health sciences
symbols.namesake
0302 clinical medicine
Humans
Immunology and Allergy
Computer Simulation
030212 general & internal medicine
Epidemics
Behavior
Internet
Data collection
biology
business.industry
Data stream mining
Models, Theoretical
Numerical weather prediction
biology.organism_classification
Data science
Multiple data
030104 developmental biology
Infectious Diseases
Big Data for Infectious Disease Surveillance and Modeling
symbols
population characteristics
The Internet
business
computer
Forecasting
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15376613 and 00221899
- Volume :
- 214
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of Infectious Diseases
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....a9f7d019e0622636e17a8f730957b9e1