ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
Influenza is an infectious disease with the potential to become a pandemic, and hence, forecasting its prevalence is an important undertaking for planning an effective response. Research has found that web search activity can be used to improve influenza models. Neural networks (NN) can provide state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy but do not commonly incorporate uncertainty in their estimates, something essential for using them effectively during decision making. In this paper, we demonstrate how Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) can be used to both provide a forecast and a corresponding uncertainty without significant loss in forecasting accuracy compared to traditional NNs. Our method accounts for two sources of uncertainty: data and model uncertainty, arising due to measurement noise and model specification, respectively. Experiments are conducted using 14 years of data for England, assessing the models accuracy over the last 4 flu seasons in this dataset. We evaluate the performance of different models including competitive baselines with conventional metrics as well as error functions that incorporate uncertainty estimates. Our empirical analysis indicates that considering both sources of uncertainty simultaneously is superior to considering either one separately. We also show that a BNN with recurrent layers that models both sources of uncertainty yields superior accuracy for these metrics for forecasting horizons greater than 7 days.
Early prediction of the prevalence of influenza reduces its impact. Various studies have been conducted to predict the number of influenza-infected people. However, these studies are not highly accurate especially in the distant future such as over o
Seasonal influenza is a sometimes surprisingly impactful disease, causing thousands of deaths per year along with much additional morbidity. Timely knowledge of the outbreak state is valuable for managing an effective response. The current state of t
Machine learning (ML) systems often encounter Out-of-Distribution (OoD) errors when dealing with testing data coming from a distribution different from training data. It becomes important for ML systems in critical applications to accurately quantify
Operational forecasting centers are investing in decadal (1-10 year) forecast systems to support long-term decision making for a more climate-resilient society. One method that has previously been employed is the Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) algo
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) place priors over the parameters in a neural network. Inference in BNNs, however, is difficult; all inference methods for BNNs are approximate. In this work, we empirically compare the quality of predictive uncertainty