Forecasting Influenza Based on Autoregressive Moving Average and Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing Models

Influenza outbreaks can be effectively prevented if further outbreaks are predicted as early as possible. This article proposes an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and a Holt-Winters exponential smoothing (HWES) model to analyze tweet data for predicting influenza outbreaks and to visualize the number of flu-infection-related tweets with heat maps. First, textual influenza data for Australia from June 2015 to June 2017 are collected through the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API). Next, the ARIMA and HWES models are applied to predict the difference between the flu tweets and confirmations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Finally, a visualized heat map based on influenza topics validates the modeling analysis in two different time zones. The results show that the average relative error of the ARIMA (HWES) model is 7.25% (11.29%) for the one-week flu forecast.