Artificial Neural Networks for the Prediction of Monkeypox Outbreak

Area of Science:

• Epidemiology
• Computational Biology
• Public Health

Background:

• The COVID-19 pandemic recovery is ongoing, while monkeypox (MPX) emerges as a potential global health threat.
• Daily reports of new monkeypox cases from multiple countries highlight the need for predictive modeling.
• Existing predictive models for infectious diseases may not fully capture the dynamics of emerging outbreaks like monkeypox.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a predictive model for monkeypox outbreak spread in the USA, UK, Germany, France, and Canada.
• To compare the performance of artificial neural network (ANN) models against Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models for monkeypox time-series data.
• To establish a novel approach for forecasting emerging infectious disease outbreaks using advanced neural network architectures.

Main Methods:

• Utilized public datasets from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control for monkeypox case data.
• Developed a single hidden layer artificial neural network (ANN) model using the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) learning technique.
• Compared ANN, LSTM, and GRU models optimized with Adam (adaptive moment estimation) using K-fold cross-validation and early stopping.

Main Results:

• The ANN model achieved an R-value of approximately 99%, outperforming LSTM (98%) and GRU (98%) models.
• All three models showed strong agreement between experimental data and forecasted monkeypox spread.
• The ANN model demonstrated superior predictive accuracy for the monkeypox dataset across all five analyzed countries.

Conclusions:

• Artificial neural network models provide a highly accurate method for predicting monkeypox outbreak trajectories.
• The developed ANN model offers a valuable tool for public health officials to anticipate and manage monkeypox spread.
• This study represents the first known application of ANN, LSTM, and GRU models for predicting monkeypox outbreaks across the USA, UK, Germany, France, and Canada.