Point Process Models for the Spread of Coccidioidomycosis in California

Coccidioidomycosis is an infectious disease of humans and other mammals that has seen a recent increase in occurrence in the southwestern United States, particularly in California. A rise in cases and risk to public health can serve as the impetus to apply newly developed methods that can quickly and accurately predict future caseloads. The recursive and Hawkes point process models with various triggering functions were fit to the data and their goodness of fit evaluated and compared. Although the point process models were largely similar in their fit to the data, the recursive point process model offered a slightly superior fit. We explored forecasting the spread of coccidioidomycosis in California from December 2002 to December 2017 using this recursive model, and we separated the training and testing portions of the data and achieved a root mean squared error of just 3.62 cases/week.