Specialist hybrid models with asymmetric training for malaria prevalence prediction

Abstract

Malaria is a common and serious disease that primarily affects developing countries and its spread is influenced by a variety of environmental and human behavioral factors; therefore, accurate prevalence prediction has been identified as a critical component of the Global Technical Strategy for Malaria from 2016 to 2030. While traditional differential equation models can perform basic forecasting, supervised machine learning algorithms provide more accurate predictions, as demonstrated by a recent study using an elastic net model (REMPS). Nevertheless, current short-term prediction systems do not achieve the required accuracy levels for routine clinical practice. To improve in this direction, stacked hybrid models have been proposed, in which the outputs of several machine learning models are aggregated by using a meta-learner predictive model. In this paper, we propose an alternative specialist hybrid approach that combines a linear predictive model that specializes in the linear component of the malaria prevalence signal and a recurrent neural network predictive model that specializes in the non-linear residuals of the linear prediction, trained with a novel asymmetric loss. Our findings show that the specialist hybrid approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art stacked models on an open-source dataset containing 22 years of malaria prevalence data from the city of Ibadan in southwest Nigeria. The specialist hybrid approach is a promising alternative to current prediction methods, as well as a tool to improve decision-making and resource allocation for malaria control in high-risk countries.