Neural Networks for Disease Outbreak Prediction Using Demographic and Environmental Factors: A Multi-City Study in West Africa

Abstract

An increasing trend in infectious disease outbreaks that are aggravated by climate change and accelerated, usually unplanned urbanisation, poses a significant and growing menace to the health of the population in West Africa. Urban centres, especially those on the coastlines, are turning out to be the centre of malaria spread, thus threatening the traditional understanding of malaria as a rural problem only. This paper came up with a single Artificial Neural Network (ANN) framework to model malaria in urban areas, which was applied to a representative sample of urbanising cities in the West African region: Nouakchott (Mauritania), Dakar (Senegal), Banjul (The Gambia), Conakry (Guinea), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Malabo (Equatorial Guinea), and Praia (Cabo Verde). The model incorporates hyper-localised demographic and environmental variables typical of these urban environments, which include temperature, precipitation, impervious surface area and population density. The regional analysis based on historical data (20012024) and future scenarios (RCP4.5/RCP8.5 and SSP2/SSP5) revealed that a 12-month lag time was the most critical, precipitation and impervious surface were the most significant predictors of most of the sites. According to the worst-case scenario (RCP8.5/SSP5) of these urban centres, the malaria incidence is projected to increase by 15-40 per cent by 2050. The ANN offered high predictive capabilities (meaning of average, R 2 = 0.89 across cities), which were significantly greater than a reference seasonal autoregressive model (meaning of average, R 2 = 0.61). These results demonstrate that urban hydrological and infrastructural considerations are of vital importance relative to climatic considerations and the worth of a regionally flexible model. The evolved framework is a strong, replicable instrument in the construction of early warning systems in the susceptible cities across the West African region, which would effectively facilitate proactive interventions in public health.