Hybrid methodology for tuberculosis incidence time-series forecasting based on ARIMA and a NAR neural network

Tuberculosis (TB) affects people globally and is being reconsidered as a serious public health problem in China. Reliable forecasting is useful for the prevention and control of TB. This study proposes a hybrid model combining autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) with a nonlinear autoregressive (NAR) neural network for forecasting the incidence of TB from January 2007 to March 2016. Prediction performance was compared between the hybrid model and the ARIMA model. The best-fit hybrid model was combined with an ARIMA (3,1,0) x (0,1,1) 12 and NAR neural network with four delays and 12 neurons in the hidden layer. The ARIMA-NAR hybrid model, which exhibited lower mean square error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error of 0.2209, 0.1373, and 0.0406, respectively, in the modelling performance, could produce more accurate forecasting of TB incidence compared to the ARIMA model. This study shows that developing and applying the ARIMA-NAR hybrid model is an effective method to fit the linear and nonlinear patterns of time-series data, and this model could be helpful in the prevention and control of TB.