A comparative study of three models to analyze the impact of air pollutants on the number of pulmonary tuberculosis cases in Urumqi, Xinjiang

In this paper, we separately constructed ARIMA, ARIMAX, and RNN models to determine whether there exists an impact of the air pollutants (such as PM(2.5), PM(10), CO, O(3), NO(2), and SO(2)) on the number of pulmonary tuberculosis cases from January 2014 to December 2018 in Urumqi, Xinjiang. In addition, by using a new comprehensive evaluation index DISO to compare the performance of three models, it was demonstrated that ARIMAX (1,1,2) × (0,1,1)(12) + PM(2.5) (lag = 12) model was the optimal one, which was applied to predict the number of pulmonary tuberculosis cases in Urumqi from January 2019 to December 2019. The predicting results were in good agreement with the actual pulmonary tuberculosis cases and shown that pulmonary tuberculosis cases obviously declined, which indicated that the policies of environmental protection and universal health checkups in Urumqi have been very effective in recent years.