Modeling and Forecasting of the Weekly Incidence of Dengue in Colombo District of Sri Lanka

Abstract

This study was designed to develop a time series model for the weekly incidence of dengue in the Colombo district of Sri Lanka. Weekly occurrence of dengue fever counts from January 2015 to August 2020 in the Epidemiological Report by the Ministry of Health was used for the study . ARIMA (2,1,0) with the addition of AR (16) was identified as the most effective model. The model was trained using data from January 2015 to December 2019. The balance data was used to validate the model. The residuals of the model satisfied the randomness and constant variance, but the residuals significantly deviated from the normality. The results showed that the forecasted figures were consistent with the observed series. However, a noticeable percentage error was observed sequentially in the late 2020s. Those errors could be attributable to the fact that there was an underreporting of dengue fever cases due to social and operational shocks of the Covid-19 Pandemic.