22: Factor analysis Methods for Mosquito-Borne Disease forecasting in Brazil

Music City Center 

Vectors are living organisms, such as mosquitoes, which transmit disease between humans. Vector-borne diseases have a high global burden, particularly among the world's poorest populations. The worst effects can be mitigated with advanced warning of these climate-mediated diseases. In Brazil, the infectious diseases Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika all co-circulate. The same mosquito vectors spread the diseases, which pose significant health and mortality risks. Infodengue is a surveillance system in Brazil for these three diseases, with a granularity of spatio-temporal data rarely seen in such systems. The system does not currently explicitly predict future cases. We present a factor analysis model, a flexible data reduction technique, in the Bayesian framework for disease forecasting with extensions to this technique relevant to our problem, including spatiotemporal modelling and joint modelling of shared vectors.

Factor Analysis

Forecasting

Vector-Borne Disease

Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations 

Section on Statistics in Epidemiology