Evaluating neighborhood structures for modeling intercity diffusion of large-scale dengue epidemics

BACKGROUND: Dengue fever is a vector-borne infectious disease that is transmitted by contact between vector mosquitoes and susceptible hosts. The literature has addressed the issue on quantifying the effect of individual mobility on dengue transmission. However, there are methodological concerns in the spatial regression model configuration for examining the effect of intercity-scale human mobility on dengue diffusion. The purposes of the study are to investigate the influence of neighborhood structures on intercity epidemic progression from pre-epidemic to epidemic periods and to compare definitions of different neighborhood structures for interpreting the spread of dengue epidemics. METHODS: We proposed a framework for assessing the effect of model configurations on dengue incidence in 2014 and 2015, which were the most severe outbreaks in 70 years in Taiwan. Compared with the conventional model configuration in spatial regression analysis, our proposed model used a radiation model, which reflects population flow between townships, as a spatial weight to capture the structure of human mobility. RESULTS: The results of our model demonstrate better model fitting performance, indicating that the structure of human mobility has better explanatory power in dengue diffusion than the geometric structure of administration boundaries and geographic distance between centroids of cities. We also identified spatial–temporal hierarchy of dengue diffusion: dengue incidence would be influenced by its immediate neighboring townships during pre-epidemic and epidemic periods, and also with more distant neighbors (based on mobility) in pre-epidemic periods. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that the structure of population mobility could more reasonably capture urban-to-urban interactions, which implies that the hub cities could be a “bridge” for large-scale transmission and make townships that immediately connect to hub cities more vulnerable to dengue epidemics. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12942-018-0131-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.