Prediction of malaria incidence in malaria epidemic area with time series models

    WEN Liang, XU Deª²Zhong, LIN Mingª²He, XIA Jieª²Lai, ZHANG Zhiª²Ying, SU Yongª²Qiang

    1Department of Epidemiology, 3Department of Health Statistics, School of Preventive Medicine, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi¬ðan 710033, China, 2Sanitary & Epidemic Prevention Station, Wanning City, Wanning 571500, China

    ¡¾Abstract¡¿ AIM: To explore the feasibility of autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to predict the malaria incidence in malaria epidemic areas. METHODS: SPSS11.0 software was used to construct the ARIMA model based on the month malaria incidence in eight malaria epidemic areas in Wanning County, Hainan Province, from Jan. 1991 to Dec. 2001. Then the constructed model was used to predict the month incidence in 2002 and the prediction was compared with the actual incidence. RESULTS: ARIMA(0,1,1)¡Á(0,1,1)12 exactly fitted the incidence of the previous monthª²incidence from Jan. 1991 to Dec. 2001, and the predicted monthª²incidence in 2002 by the model was consistent with the actual incidence. CONCLUSION: The method of time series analysis can be used to fit exactly the changes of malaria incidence and to predict the incidence trend in future. ......