Foodborne disease is a growing public health problem worldwide and imposes a considerable economic burden on hospitals and other healthcare costs. Thus, accurately predicting the propagation of foodborne disease is crucial in preventing foodborne disease outbreaks. Few studies have investigated the dependencies between environmental variables and foodborne disease activity. This study develops a regularization-based eXtreme gradient boosting approach for foodborne disease trend forecasting considering environmental effects to capture dependencies hidden in foodborne disease time series. A real case in Shanghai, China was studied to validate our proposed model along with comparisons to traditional and benchmark algorithms for foodborne disease prediction. Results show that the foodborne disease prediction approach we propose achieves slightly superior performance in terms of one-day-ahead prediction of foodborne disease, and presents more robust prediction for 2-7 days ahead prediction.
Keywords: Algorithms; foodborne diseases; machine learning.