Dual-attention-based recurrent neural network for hand-foot-mouth disease prediction in Korea

Hand–foot–mouth disease (HFMD) is a viral disease that occurs primarily in children. Meteorological factors have a significant impact on its popularity annually in Korea. This study proposes a new HFMD prediction model using a dual-attention-based recurrent neural network (DA-RNN) and important weather factors for HFMD in Korea. First, suspected cases of HFMD in each state were predicted using meteorological factors from the DA-RNN. Second, the weather factors were divided into six categories: temperature, wind, rainfall, day length, humidity, and air pollution to conduct sensitivity analysis. Because of this prediction, the proposed model showed the best performance in predicting the number of suspected HFMD cases in a week compared with other RNN methods. Sensitivity analysis showed that air pollution and rainfall play an important role in HFMD in Korea. This model provides information for HFMD prevention and control and can be extended to predict other infectious diseases.