Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    An ensemble neural network approach to forecast Dengue outbreak based on climatic condition
    (2023) ;
    Panja, Madhurima
    ;
    Nadim. Sk Shahid
    ;
    Ghosh, Indrajit
    ;
    Kumar, Uttam
    ;
    Liu, Nan
    Dengue fever is a virulent disease spreading over 100 tropical and subtropical countries in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. This arboviral disease affects around 400 million people globally, severely distressing the healthcare systems. The unavailability of a specific drug and ready-to-use vaccine makes the situation worse. Hence, policymakers must rely on early warning systems to control intervention-related decisions. Forecasts routinely provide critical information for dangerous epidemic events. However, the available forecasting models (e.g., weather-driven mechanistic, statistical time series, and machine learning models) lack a clear understanding of different components to improve prediction accuracy and often provide unstable and unreliable forecasts. This study proposes an ensemble wavelet neural network with exogenous factor(s) (XEWNet) model that can produce reliable estimates for dengue outbreak prediction for three geographical regions, namely San Juan, Iquitos, and Ahmedabad. The proposed XEWNet model is flexible and can easily incorporate exogenous climate variable(s) confirmed by statistical causality tests in its scalable framework. The proposed model is an integrated approach that uses wavelet transformation into an ensemble neural network framework that helps in generating more reliable long-term forecasts. The proposed XEWNet allows complex non-linear relationships between the dengue incidence cases and rainfall; however, mathematically interpretable, fast in execution, and easily comprehensible. The proposal's competitiveness is measured using computational experiments based on various statistical metrics and several statistical comparison tests. In comparison with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods, our proposed XEWNet performs better in 75% of the cases for short-term and long-term forecasting of dengue incidence.
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  • Publication
    Searching for Heavy-Tailed Probability Distributions for Modeling Real-World Complex Networks
    (2022) ;
    Chattopadhyay, Swarup
    ;
    Das, Suchismita
    ;
    Kumar, Uttam
    ;
    Senthilnath, J.
    Perhaps the most recent controversial topic in network science research is to determine whether real-world complex networks are scale-free or not. Recently, Broido and Clauset [A.D. Broido, A. Clauset, Nature Communication, 10, 1017 (2019)] asserted that the degree distributions of real-world networks are rarely power law under statistical tests. Such complex networks, including social, biological, information, temporal, and brain networks, are often heavy-tailed where the assumption on the scale-free nature of realworld heavy-tailed networks become insignificant as the complex system evolves over time. The failure of power law distribution in fitting the degree distribution data is mainly due to the presence of an identifiable non-linearity within the entire degree distribution in a log-log scale of a complex heavy-tailed network. In this study, we attempt to address this issue by proposing a new class of heavy-tailed probability distributions for modeling the entire degree distributions of complex networks. We introduce a new family of generalized Lomax models (GLM) to capture the non-linearity of these heavy-tailed networks. These newly introduced GLM-type distributions provide better fitting and greater flexibility to the entire node degree distribution of complex networks. Several statistical properties of the proposed model, such as extreme value and inferential statistical properties, are derived into this context. Interestingly, the GLM family belongs to the basin of attraction of Frechet distribution, a heavy-tailed extreme value distribution. Rigorous experimental analysis showcases the excellent performance of the proposed family of distributions while fitting the heavytailed real-world complex networks over fifty real-world datasets in comparison with benchmark probability models. Our results show that GLM-type distributions are not rare, able to model almost 90% of the tested networks accurately compared to benchmark probability models. INDEX TERMS Complex networks, heavy-tailed networks, degree distribution, Lomax distribution, extreme value properties.
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