Dengue Risk Forecast with Mosquito Vector: A Multicomponent Fusion Approach Based on Spatiotemporal Analysis

Dengue as an acute infectious disease threatens global public health and has sparked broad research interest. However, existing studies generally ignore the spatial dependencies involved in dengue forecast, and consideration of temporal periodicity is absent. In this work, we propose a spatiotemporal component fusion model (STCFM) to solve the dengue risk forecast issue. Considering that mosquitoes are an important vector of dengue transmission, we introduce feature factors involving mosquito abundance and spatiotemporal lags to model temporal trends and spatial distributions separately on the basis of statistical properties. Specifically, we conduct multiscale modeling of temporal dependencies to enhance the forecast capability of relevant periods by capturing the historical variation patterns of the data across different segments in the temporal dimension. In the spatial dimension, we quantify the multivariate spatial correlation analysis as additional features to strengthen the spatial feature representation and adopt the ConvLSTM model to learn spatial dependencies adequately. The final forecast results are obtained by stacking strategy fusion in ensemble learning. We conduct experiments on real dengue datasets. The results indicate that STCFM improves prediction accuracy through effective spatiotemporal feature representations and outperforms candidate models with a reasonable component construction strategy.