Title: Investigating the effects of climate factors on bacillary dysentery transmission in Harbin City, China

Authors: Feng-Feng Shao; Hao Zhang; Guo-Zheng Li; Chun-Pu Zou; Xue-Qiang Zeng

Addresses: The Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai, China ' School of Basic Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China ' Data Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, China ' School of Basic Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China ' The Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Abstract: Bacillary dysentery is an infectious disease and external environmental factors including climate factors play a significant role in its transmission. In this paper, climate-related risk factor is identified and prediction model is built for bacillary dysentery. The database used in this study is integrated monthly climate factors and incidence rates in Harbin City from 1986 to 1990. Three consecutive months' climate data are used to predict one month's incidence in order to find the relevant factors for bacillary dysentery transmission. The least absolute shrinkage and selectionator operator is applied to select related climate factors. Then, the prediction model is built by using the selected climate factors. Through the results of the experiments, monthly accumulative precipitation, daily maximum precipitation, daily maximum precipitation of the past one month, monthly mean minimum temperature and monthly mean wind velocity are found to result in the highest relative risk for bacillary dysentery.

Keywords: bacillary dysentery; climate factors; feature selection; prediction models; modelling; dysentery transmission; China; infectious diseases; disease transmission; precipitation; rainfall; temperature; wind speed; wind velocity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIH.2015.069789

International Journal of Computers in Healthcare, 2015 Vol.2 No.2, pp.72 - 83

Received: 05 May 2014
Accepted: 17 Feb 2015
Published online: 11 Jun 2015 *

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