Early Warning of Infectious Diseases in Hospitals Based on Multi-Self-Regression Deep Neural Network

OBJECTIVE: Infectious diseases usually spread rapidly. This study aims to develop a model that can provide fine-grained early warnings of infectious diseases using real hospital data combined with disease transmission characteristics, weather, and other multi-source data. METHODS: Based on daily data reported for infectious diseases collected from several large general hospitals in China between 2012 and 2020, seven common infectious diseases in medical institutions were screened and a multi self-regression deep (MSRD) neural network was constructed. Using a recurrent neural network as the basic structure, the model can effectively model the epidemiological trend of infectious diseases by considering the current influencing conditions while taking into account the historical development characteristics in time-series data. The fitting and prediction accuracy of the model were evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error. RESULTS: The proposed approach is significantly better than the existing infectious disease dynamics model, susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR), as it addresses the concerns of difficult-to-obtain quantitative data such as latent population, overfitting of long time series, and considering only a single series of the number of sick people without considering the epidemiological characteristics of infectious diseases. We also compare certain machine learning methods in this study. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an MAE of 0.6928 and 1.3782 for hand, foot, and mouth disease and influenza, respectively. CONCLUSION: The MRSD-based infectious disease prediction model proposed in this paper can provide daily and instantaneous updates and accurate predictions for epidemic trends.